A wave, cast in silver
Portugal is not new to me; I have been going since I was small, most summers and almost always the Algarve, so that by now it has the strange status of a place I chose to love before I had any of the vocabulary for why — the heat lifting off the stone in the late afternoon, the smell of salt and dry pine, the sea never more than a turn of the road away.
You do not really design in a place like that. You only look, and it stays with you without asking permission, and then years later it comes back out through your hands as though it had been waiting the whole time.
It is a country of small, repeated things, which is maybe why it suits me: lemons on every second tree, heavy enough to pull the branch down, and the tiles, the azulejos, blue and white and hand-painted across the fronts of the houses, no two walls ever quite agreeing with each other.
On the last trip I scanned a few of them with a little handheld scanner, the kind you drag slowly across a surface and hope you didn’t shake. I had no plan for it. I only knew I wanted to keep the pattern, the way you want to keep a smell, knowing that you can’t.
The cuff began on that same trip — a holiday with family, in 2025 — one of those weeks where nothing is scheduled and the days lose their edges: long mornings, slower afternoons, the sea always somewhere in the corner of the eye.
One afternoon I sat and watched the same stretch of water come in over and over, the way a wave folds over itself, holds a second longer than you expect, then draws back, and I watched it for far longer than made any sense, until the curve of it had somehow attached itself to me and would not leave for the rest of the trip.
Back in the studio it was the first thing I drew, before I had decided it would become anything at all, and once it existed on paper I went looking for someone who could make it properly — which turned out to be a silversmith in Portugal, close to that same coast, who has been doing this most of his life.
Sterling 925, gold-plated, cast and finished by hand, one at a time. The arc is not a decoration laid on top of the piece; it is the wave itself, held still. Wear it for a while and it warms, softens at the edges, and quietly starts to take on you, rather than the other way around.
What I like — and I am aware this is the sort of thing a person says about their own work — is that everything in it lines up: the place the idea came from, the country it is made in, the hands that make it, the pace of the making, none of it forced to move faster than it wants to.
It arrives in autumn 2026 — the second cuff, and the one I am most sure of.