LESLEY STRICKLAND Jewellery
Lesley is a British Jeweller specialising in the use of cellulose acetate combined with sterling silver. Her passion for designing and making jewellery started in 1976 at the City Literary Institute, London. She was fortunate to have an excellent teacher and has continued to develop her personal style.
Her early work was a combination of acrylic and silver and was mainly inspired by Art Deco. In its heyday, the Design Council Shop in The Haymarket, London sold a considerable amount of this work. After 10 years of exploring the acrylic/silver combination she searched for a new medium and inspiration.
Her new medium is a cellulose material based on cotton oil that can be made in a wide range of patterns and be manipulated into far more fluid forms than the relatively brittle acrylic. Her current visual inspiration comes from organic forms such as fossils, crustacea and plant forms.
Concurrent to the shift in style and material, she commissioned a graphic designer with a special interest in the 20th century European company marks, to design a new corporate identity. The distinctive LS symbol now appears on all her graphic material and as a small etched silver dot that is inlaid into appropriate pieces.
Over the last 25 years she has developed many new manufacturing techniques, either by modifying existing hand or industrial processes or by inventing them from first principles. The final finish of her work is vitally important to her as she wants the wearer to have a very tactile relationship with each piece. To achieve this goal she has developed special methods of forming, polishing and matting the acetate. The basic methods are hand-scraping, filing and sanding, followed by heat forming and polishing and matting. Some pieces are decorated with silver pique whilst others combine spiral acetate forms with elegant silver elements. Small batch quantities of each design are made and each piece is individually hand crafted by Lesley and thoroughly inspected for a fine finish.
The two guiding principles that Lesley applies to all her work are to strive for elegant simplicity and to empathize with the wearer. This has enabled her to develop continuously fashionable, wearable jewellery.
