Edited by Rebecca Alexander on
Vicki Ambery-Smith creates delicate and ornate small-scale jewelery and boxes inspired by real and imaginary buildings. Especially attracted to the structural clarity and minimal ornament of Romanesque and Renaissance architecture, she also uses forms reminiscent of the modernist structures of Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright sometimes explicitly, as in the brooch Guggenheim Museum (NY), 1998.
More recently she has become attracted to contemporary and future architecture, working on brooches based on Daniel Libeskind’s bold, jarring forms, a significant move away from the classic structures with which her jewelery is associated.
As all her jewelery is designed to be worn, and worn comfortably, the three-dimensional architectural structures on which she bases her work must be adapted rather than merely replicated in miniature, with the effect of distancing them further from their original referent. In this way, attention is drawn to the form of the pieces, and their intricate detail and definition. Far more than a representation of a building, each becomes an exquisite study of shape, surface, light and space as Ambery-Smith explores the language of architecture herself.
Rebecca does not like biographies. They are stupid and she would rather spend her time editing the site. Which she does with great vigor.