Laura Micheli jewellery Made in Italy

Architecture plays a very important role in the work of jewellery designers and after Matuta we are happy to take you to the cultivated and kind world of a very young outsider, Laura Micheli Jewellery, architect and creator of beautiful jewellery.

Born in Novi Ligure, Laura grows from her roots. One of her grandparents owned a furnace and, even if she never met him, as a child she was already fascinated by the idea that some buildings in the town were built with those bricks. The other grandfather worked in a bank, he was a man of numbers, a collector who dedicated himself to “do-it-yourself”. Right there, among his tools, the first jewels were born: nails, nuts, and bolts, joined by rubber and metal wires.

Architecture and philosophy in the education of Laura Micheli

Laura Micheli loves philosophy: E. Kant and the romantics have liberated beauty from classical perfection, welcoming the shapeless, chaotic and the Sublime of nature. Laura understands that Beauty can express itself by combining opposites and the Ugly isn’t the denial of Beauty, but only the other side of it. This is the kind of beauty that has always fascinated her, the one that lies in imperfection, in imprecision, in emotion and that she will bring back alive in all her jewels.

The architecture was a choice carved in her DNA. To learn how to design on a large scale, she trains on small architectural models. She learns how to work with wood, how to cast concrete, plaster, and wax. At the same time, she approaches the use of metals such as aluminum, copper, brass, and bronze.

It is not uncommon for architects to be interested in the design of jewellery, but this relationship results above all in the shape of the jewellery itself: geometric shapes, right angles, essential and minimalist lines. For Laura Micheli, the link between architecture and jewellery is above all in creative thinking, in the design method, in the use of references, in recognizing the importance of history and memory. From an aesthetic point of view, however, the jewel has its own expression, more independent and artistic, that of romantic beauty – of Sublime.

Making jewellery Laura has learned the beauty of the imperfect. A jewel is not only beautiful when perfectly shaped and shiny, but when it is the result of creative thought, when it tells a story, of people or places, when it is experimentation when it is handmade, it is “imperfect” and therefore unique.

Laura Micheli Jewellery The beauty of imperfection

In her hometown Novi Ligure there is a small jewelry workshop, inside a woman and her son make beautiful jewelry in precious metals. Thanks to them Laura learns the basics of jewelry: cutting, filing, welding, and polishing. At the beginning she works with aluminum, copper, and bronze, then silver and gold. After the start, it all came spontaneously. She didn’t look for this passion, it found Laura.

Today, after following intensive jewelry courses in Paris, Milan, and London, she decided to establish her own atelier between Zurich and Milan.

The creative process behind her jewelry can start from a formal or aesthetic inspiration, from a memory or from the client’s request. She is often inspired by nature (Euphoria Series), travel (Masai Series, inspired by the practice of ornamental scars in Africa and in particular in Tanzania), art (Circus Series, inspired by the artist Yves Klein and “Body Art”), or memories (the Marmolada and Latemar rings are shaped on the two homonymous mountains in the Dolomites, place where Laura spent her summer holidays as a child).