NEW Collection:
Petit Plats des Feuilles
studio jewellery collection and essay by Julie Bailey
September 2025
The collection grew from what began as experiments with printmaking marks, petals, and botanical silhouettes and has evolved into a language of plates and leaves.
The early “Florist’s Choice” pieces, seasonal arrangements that echoed the florists choice for a hand-tied bouquet has carried over into a more distilled approach. Where those works were abundant, these are pared back, closer to ikebana: single stems, floating leaves, space as important as form.
The porcelain plate studies offered another clue, that a shallow dish, barely more than a surface, can hold presence. In Petit Plats des Feuilles, the brooches and pendants recall such vessels: small stages where fragments rest, not as decoration but as offerings.
Walking along the canal in autumn, watching leaves drift and settle, gave the final image. Petit Plats des Feuilles grew from a quiet observation: how a single fallen leaf can rest on the surface of water, both delicate and certain, anchored by nothing but its own form. I became interested in this balance between weight and lightness, in the way nature offers small compositions that seem at once spontaneous and inevitable. A quiet choreography, something slight and weightless, yet deeply grounding. The pieces intend to hold that balance, the floating and the anchored, the delicate and the enduring.
Each brooch, lariat, or earring set is built around this principle. From the leaf clouds and repoussé marquise forms, the billet-bar stems, the bone seeds set in metal, riveted pieces of ancient oak, the detachable drops, all are modular fragments that can be gathered, rearranged, or worn singly, like leaves placed in water. Their restraint is deliberate. Not performance, but attentiveness.
The materials extend the metaphor. Paper embossed fine silver carries the softness; reclaimed old gold is cut and billet-ed into linear threads; jet, and sub-fossil oak, bring depth, grounding the brightness. Vintage bone counters and mother-of-pearl add their quiet history, whispering of other hands, other lives. And coffee coloured raw diamonds, agates, jaspers, jades create a palette to compliment and support.
Underlying all of this is a wish to protect provenance and integrity. The metals are reclaimed and traceable; the wood is drawn from the ground, ; the beads and stones are cut from materials already formed. Nothing here is fast or disposable. Each work, even in its lightness, is weighted with care for where it came from, and for the space it might hold in the life of its wearer.
At the heart of Petit Plats des Feuilles is the idea of a quiet modularity. Studs can hold detachable drops, brooches can be worn rearranged as simple tableaux, lariats can be threaded half-and-half with darker or lighter beads. Each piece exists in more than one state: pared back, elongated, suspended, or gathered close. In this, the collection resists finality, it remains open, shifting, like the arrangements in nature that first inspired it.
What emerges is not a fixed set but echoes ikebana and a tableau personnalisé, a personalised arrangement that can shift with the wearer, and the artist smith who made it, and the joy found in the moment of quiet beauty.
I. Introduction: A Slow Gathering
This body of work didn’t arrive all at once. It’s the result of a slow, unforced gathering. Shapes, fragments, materials, and methods, accumulated across more than thirty years of observing, making, and keeping. Some of these forms first appeared in early sketchbooks or emerged from other disciplines; printmaking, ceramic vessels, cut paper collages. Others are inherited, found, or carried forward in the hand.
II. On Form: Repetition, Cloud Shape, Botanical Trace
The recurring shape in these pieces, somewhere between a cloud, a leaf petal, and a small platter, arrived organically. It sits nicely at the edge of familiarity and abstraction. I think of them as quiet forms: they frame and contain without insisting. They reference nature, ornament, and function, but don’t mimic anything too directly. In some ways they are small offerings, platelike, and like in printmaking, holding memory and material equally.
III. On Material: The Found and the Foraged, Mud-larking
There’s a particular kind of attention that happens outside the studio, not in pursuit of a design, but in a moment of encounter. A small, strange pebble. A bleached and picked clean skeleton of a bird. A discarded object with no reason to be kept except for how it insists on the senses. These things rarely arrive with intention, they appear while walking, tidying, sorting They are noticed, not sought. Found, not fetched. And yet, they shape the work.
I work with materials that carry a trace of history, provenance or quiet meaning. Some of them, like jet, bone, or wood, were once living. Others have lived other lives: recycled silver, heirloom gold, reclaimed red gold from high carat sovereigns, offcuts and tests from previous work. Their surface histories remain visible, even if partially buried. I don’t polish these materials into silence. I prefer them to remain slightly weathered, like something that has passed through time and been touched many times.
In my current work, many of these elements: mahjong bone scorers long lost in a junk draw, the gift of a lump of subfossil oak found in an excavated pond on a hillside in France, a piece of Whitby jet gathered on the beach on a dog walk, an intricately engraved mother of pearl gaming counter pocketed by my mother as a small child, the vintage broken bugle beads from a necklace my grandmother wore collected and saved in a small jar, all are pressed into service and have become anchors. A suggestion that honours their quiet persistence. Their surviving.
In the studio, there’s a similar impulse to pick up what’s been put aside, to pay attention to the half- shaped, the half-known. Some materials I’ve carried with me for years before they’ve found their place. Others re-emerge because I had mislaid them. These are not flaws in the process, they are the process.
To make in this way is to accept that the work will be layered, not just physically, but in intention. A kind of palimpsest. One that allows time.The meaning often catching up later. The work is therefore not just mine, it belongs to the place, the materials, and the often mis-laid.
“Her studio practice echoes the spirit of mud-larking, not in its literal muddy banks, but in its patient, grounded philosophy. The act of looking, slowly and without certainty, is something she knows well. Just as a mudlark combs the foreshore, not for what is expected but for what emerges, she too allows materials to surface when they are ready, often out of place, out of time, and out of function.
She does not buy her materials in bulk or by trend. Often, they are found, gifted, inherited, weathered. Mother of Pearl counters from a forgotten game, ancient bog oak unearthed from the hillside, a bead cut from a rock worn down by time, each carries a story already half-formed. Her role is not to impose, but to complete the telling.
The pieces she creates are less about transformation and more about re-finding. They are composed from small gathered truths: fragments of place, time, and memory, the overlooked, the discarded, the half-seen. What she retrieves is something enduring, maybe a resonance.
This approach is not sentimental; it is intentional. It requires a kind of trust: in the process, in the materials, and in the idea that what is meant to belong in the work will arrive when it is ready.”
comments from an observer
IV. On Process: Drawing, Cutting, Assembling
The design process is observational. I cut paper, sketch loosely, lay things on a bench, move them about a bit, often, quiet placings, and then letting them sit. There is time involved, not just the making, but the quiet watching. One that honours accidents and offcuts. I often work in modules, repeating a shape across different scales or materials. Sometimes I’ll return to an old form years later, and it will finally find its place in a new piece. And sometimes I get excited with a new shape and the struggles to help it sing, with many trial and error iterations. Until it finds its voice.
These works are not meant to be decorative in the traditional sense, although I can see that they are, though they also value beauty. They are more like field notes from the studio in metal and other materials.
The making processes echo this ethos of care. Embossing captures the fleeting impression of paper or petals pressed into soft silver. Repoussé raises cloud-like forms from flat sheet, light and shadow shifting across their curves. Wire is drawn, cut, and soldered. Billet bars where silver and gold are fused in deliberate tension. Even the foot rings on the brooches and tableau lariats are there to raise the piece slightly, like the base of a small dish, that allows it appear as if floating lightly, held like leaf on water.
Naming is part of the process. I record what I have used, where it came from, and how I found it. These become my material field notes, not just for provenance, but as a way of honouring the life of a thing.
V. Closing: Towards a New Series
Petit Plat des Feuilles, the name of this new series, translates from the french as “small dish of leaves.” It holds the sense of something botanical, everyday, and intentionally made. This new work brings together past fragments with hopefully a newer current clarity. A shift towards more refined forms, more precise fabrication, and a deeper confidence in quietness
This collection could not exist apart from the life that surrounds it. The walks inYorkshire’s landscapes, the foraging on Northumberland’s beaches, the quiet hours spent tending a small garden with the dogs close by, these are not separate from the work, but part of it.
My practice, the making, is simply another way of noticing, of attending. Another way of gathering what is already given. Petit Plats des Feuilles is one expression of this life, quiet, grounded, grateful.