MONTSERRAT LACOMBA

Enameled Copper & Sterling Silver Dreaming Earrings

Known for its energetic festivals like the La Tomatina (or Tomato Throwing Festival), and numerous museums Valencia, Spain is a place of fun and historical significance. 

Spain is also home to featured jewelry designer Montserrat Lacomba.

When it comes to jewelry making someone who is reaching for art, rather than commerce, will not abide by hard-and-fast rules.  This is always the game-plan for a contemporary art jeweler. 

These jewelry artists know full well that true art has no boundaries; and that means the visuals will be the antithesis to mainstream jewelry.  The wares from these jewelers are not pristine or glamorous; but it is precisely this lack of fanfare that makes the jewelry so fascinating.

A graduate of the University of Barcelona, who has exhibited her work in group and solo exhibitions throughout Spain, Lacomba incorporates largely traditional materials including sterling silver, copper and enamel to produce her straightforward designs.  Nonetheless her style is off beat in its colorful yet makeshift, opaque presentation.

Color pops, courtesy of colored enamel that still seem to be bubbling from applied heat, bring this rustic aesthetic to life.  Rudimentary forms are central to her funky, roughhewn silver and copper earrings, necklaces, brooch pins and rings. 

The experimental artist, who taught drawing for 18-years, credits nature as a longstanding muse.  Observing the hypnotic expanse of landscapes, in particular, inform her design approach.

Oxidized and Enameled Copper Painted Forest in a Dream Brooch Pin

“I am a passionate person who needs to make things.  My work is primarily based on observing landscapes as well as how landscapes are interpreted by different cultural and artistic disciplines. 

I try to transmit in a jewel the emotion that a mountain gives me, or a river or a poem that speaks about the beauty of a particular place.  Landscapes always surprise me with new colors and new shapes,” says the 56-year-old.

The abstract mien of her askew yet engaging brooch pins reflect Lacomba’s interest in painters’, like Joaquim Mir, and her fascination with natural scenery. 

“My Impossible Landscapes series is born mainly from the admiration I feel for painters who have treated the topic of landscape as the focus of the work and not the background.  When we are surrounded by the landscape our view gets lost into the infinite space.

When we frame a fragment of landscape through a window or a camera lens we make it ours.  Like a window I capture landscapes and make them into small, wearable pieces.”

Two Points Necklace with Enameled Copper, Sterling Silver
and Steel

2015 Jewelry Trend Alert: The geometric motif of circles was popular in the 60s and 70s and is a strong trend this year.  

Lacomba’s unconventional circle necklaces do carry the same groovy vibe.