Natalya Pinchuk is a Russian jewellery designer who works with felted wool, believing the material to have connotations of warmth and protection. She is drawn to flowers, fruits and vegetation. I love how she combines so many materials together to create one form, giving such variation of textures and colours, and how when worn her work (particularly from the Growth Series) gives the appearance of flowers and fungi sprouting from the person. They’re so unusual and daring! She writes about how she often intends to make something practical and appropriate but her designs always amount to something far louder, that she believes expression is as important as practicality.

I’ve come back to her work in my most recent self directed project where I am also studying growth and nature. I love the colours, forms and textures she has created and find her ability to almost design her own nature very interesting.

“My work is dominated by structure and abstraction. I try to create the illusion of a solid surface by using positive and negative spaces, light and shadows, and transparency. In my work I use my knowledge of geometry to create three-dimensional volumetric forms using planes, juxtaposing organic silhouettes and geometric shapes, structure, and patterns. I use repetition as a principle: in the overall appearance (the patterns that I create) as well as in the constructing process (multiple soldering).”