My work is underpinned by my personal belief that almost everything around us has its own kind of consciousness. We are immersed in a web of awareness, a field of subtle interactions between different beings, which we can start to observe if we choose to. We are connected to this living, breathing world around us. We also depend on it for our survival.

I feel most at home in the forest - held by Nature, supported by her, and endlessly inspired by her forms, colours and fractal patterns. Nature has so much to teach: Everything is cyclical. There is a season for everything, which will pass, every time. Death is just the beginning. Nature uses many different types of communication. Nothing is wasted. Everything has its purpose, even if it is ‘just’ to flower. Nature shifts, changes, unfolds, grows under our feet, adapts constantly.

We as a human species have behaved abominably, to our own detriment. Perhaps we could begin to change our perspective if we moved from exploitation mode to collaboration mode. Working closely with all kinds of natural shapes in my art allows me to immerse myself in that web of consciousness, study these different species and their interactions intimately, celebrate Nature’s limitless beauty and inventiveness, and share my obsession with the world.

When I make something - when I draw or paint, cook, write, stitch, enamel, saw, fabricate jewellery, design, imagine a piece of art in my head - I often feel myself moving into an expanded state of being. In this space, I feel connected to a larger, ineffable yet benign source of energy. I feel as if I am opening myself up, gaining access to a vast pool of ideas, dreams and archetypes that might not all be my own, but seem to belong to the world at large. To me, this feels both utterly mysterious and completely normal. Being in communication with this energy is a two-way flow: I feel filled up with ideas, motivation, joy and enthusiasm, and I respond with gratitude, reverence and devotion.

This mixture of meditative and intentional crafting can become a type of prayer, capturing my emotions in my work - my joys and troubles, my excitement at being alive, my reverence for the skilled craft traditions that have come before me, and my devotion to Mother Earth who has birthed everyone and everything. While the making is often more important to me than the finished objects, they matter because they carry a permanent record of my creative prayer. Each piece I create will bear the marks of my hands and spirit; it will carry my intentions out into the world. As you encounter my work, may you feel your heart expand, may you be reminded of the mystery and the wonder of living, and may your entire being fill up with light.

One of my core missions in this life is to re-enchant my personal world and hopefully the lives I touch, too. Re-enchantment means restoring a spark of awe, of otherworldliness, of the numinous to everyday life. It means understanding the universe as a mysterious and unknowable and magical place. I am not against science, on the contrary. But science becomes most fascinating where it pushes right up against the fuzzy edge of the mystery of life.

Re-enchanting the world means opening yourself up for unpredictable opportunities. It means daily excitement at the prospect of living. It means entertaining the idea that we hardly understand anything at all, and that there may be secret invisible worlds all around us.

Re-enchanting the world is an act of defiance against darker forces that thrive on war, conflict, exploitation and suffering; it is a form of empowerment and mental liberation. At its core, re-enchanting the world involves finding, channelling and nursing your personal creative energy. I search for little shards of magic to integrate into my creations, so that the work I make can be a powerful carrier of this enchantment energy and a daily reminder to look at life through that magical lens.

Feed your inner child! I spent my twenties and early thirties trying to shoulder my responsibilities and become a ‘real’ adult. Now, moving into my mid-thirties, I’m finding it important to return to my inner Little Nora, to indulge her craving for colour, pattern, costume and play, magic and make-belief. This is another important source of creative energy. Searching for joy quite literally feeds the fountain of my creative capabilities. Joy makes difficult things feel effortless. It is my personal insurance policy against burnout and fatigue and self-doubt.

Searching for joy means doing things with no clear purpose, playing games with yourself, being a little frivolous, dancing with the seriousness of life. It may also mean the practice of finding joy in an activity you usually think of as rather unpleasant, like doing the dishes. Joy is infectious, it is bubbly and light and completely free. I try to surround myself with objects that evoke spontaneous joy: a favourite gemstone, my watercolours, a card I like, a luscious piece of fabric, nourishing food. To me, nothing evokes joy as reliably as vibrant, bold colours and patterns.

I truly hope that my art, especially my jewellery, can act as a buoy of delightfulness for others in their own journey of cultivating joy.

The concept of the Sacred Feminine is an archetype, a primordial force of creative power that reaches far back into the nebulous origins of culture. It is rooted in a woman’s miracle-like ability to create and birth new life from her womb, and by extension, all creation energy and the birthing of new ideas into the world (by any gender). It connects the energy of creativity directly to the divine, and is fuelled by love. It is associated with the unconscious mind, and therefore potentially threatening for those that fear the dark. I experience the Sacred Feminine as the seat of my personal power and intuition, my source of self-knowledge, trust in the world, wellspring of abundance, my refuge and my oracle, a portal to my own creative expression and my spiritual umbilical cord tethering me to divinity.

The Sacred Feminine is a powerful force in many different cultures and religions across the world, yet it has been systematically maligned, demonized, suppressed and persecuted for centuries, if not millennia.

I want to revive and celebrate the Sacred Feminine through my work. My multi-disciplinary creative process itself emphasises intuitive work and interconnectedness. Many of my designs are infused with symbolism associated with Nature as the great Mother and the Sacred Feminine: fruit and flowers, water and the ocean, pearls, gemstones, colour symbolism, roses and rose hips, apples, and above all, the pomegranate. Powerful in its duality, the pomegranate embodies the light and the dark; death, blood and destruction, but also fertility, the miracle of life, the tenderness of love and the phoenix-like magical possibility of renewal. I hope that my work can serve as a constant reminder of our own sacred strength - especially for those of us who identify as female.

In a world that is measurably becoming more monochrome (think popular car colours, tech, clothing, interior design, etc.), it is one of my missions to contribute more colour. Colour captures and transports our moods and feelings; it allows for unique emotional articulation. Being colour-conscious means being more aware of effects different colours can have on us. By draining our world of colour, we are depriving ourselves of this very archetypal personal expression.

In the Western world, non-colour is often synonymous with sophistication, while bright colours signify a child-like mindset. This is an idea I find infuriating and which I seek to undermine through my work, adding a splash of colour that is both playful and powerfully stimulating. I continuously experiment with different colour combinations and love how the technique of enamelling lends itself to merging and layering colours in spectacular new ways.

More colour, obviously, signifies more diversity. A lack of diversity, whether in ecology, in society, or culture, leads to instability and erosion with disastrous consequences. I believe in the freedom of personal expression – as much as possible without infringing on the freedom of others – in all spheres of our lives. A colourful world would certainly be a healthier one.

Apart from time and physical energy, our attention – meaning our intentional and directed focus – is one of the most valuable limited resources we possess. It is now under constant attack by a flashing, wildly stimulating, noisy and fast-paced world out there, making it incredibly hard to hold on to. Our attention is made into a product by global media companies, who reach into our private lives in increasingly invasive and pernicious ways.

I try to pay more attention to that which I am paying attention to, putting up guard rails against ‘attention leakage’. We all get distracted by shiny things on the internet, so it’s useful to ask: What types of content are truly nourishing, and what seems hollow, inflated and without substance? While I love using digital media to enrich and share my creative world, I want it to feel authentic. I seek to carve out more space to pay attention to my creative work and the meaning it creates in my life. With AI creating vast amounts of vaporous content now, commanding our own attention will become an ever more important skill in the future. Truly being able to pay attention to the quality of our experience is the first requirement for finding awe, re-enchantment, connection and creative flow. Giving someone your undivided attention is the most precious gift we can give.

While I cherish my solitary creative time, I don’t believe we evolved to navigate life alone. Being part of a strong community gives our lives purpose and creates the stories we weave into our personal web of meaning. We are made to share, connect, question, exchange, give, take, support and mould each other. We have that miraculous and inexplicable capability to love.

I consider my relationships and friendships among the most valuable assets of my life – far more precious than any material object could ever be. I understand relationships to be living, breathing entities; fragile yet adaptable, fibrous, resistant and incredibly strong.

At Atelier NONNE 11 in Bamberg, we have begun to cultivate a beautiful network of like-minded creative souls and craft enthusiasts. Above and beyond my actual art-making work, this creative nexus really nourishes me in a way I could never have anticipated. My husband and business partner Alvaro and I will continue to nurture this network through exhibitions, artist talks, workshops and all kinds of formal and informal in-person gatherings in the studio space and beyond.

Curiosity is the fountain of youth. In my personal questioning of the elderly around me, it seems clear that those who retain a sharp intellect in old age are also those who remain continuously interested in the world, who never stop learning, who pursue a passion, who read and question and think, who search for connections between different disciplines and who lean into the mystery of life.

Continuing the search does not mean being discontented in the present moment with who we are and what we have. Rather, it means staying supple and dynamic as the world shifts below our feet, remaining interested and playful enough to adapt to new challenges.

For me, it is in the search that I replenish my creative reservoirs and keep expanding my inner world. Every time I revisit an idea, it spirals out further into the universe. My work is often underpinned by stories that might not be visible at surface level – deep rabbit holes of research into history and mythology and culture, evolutionary science, ethnobotany, psychology and the process of meaning-making. My pieces are crystalline embodiments of these thoughts. Even though it is enough to find joy simply in the aesthetics of a piece, every one of my creations carries its own story.