Perspectival Shift
Studiomama’s new collection with Point Two Five uses perspectival sleights of hand to create jewellery imbued with humour and romance (image: Point Two Five).
The curb chain hangs around your neck, weighted down with its pendant of recycled bronze, plated in gleaming silver. The chain slips through a metal ring, whose circumference traces a circle before flowing outwards into a soft oblong of silvered bronze. The pendant initially resembles a line drawing of a person’s torso – the ring a head, the oblong their shoulders – but this changes when the necklace is taken off and the ring slipped onto a finger. Suddenly, the view onto the pendant changes.
This is Viewfinder, a new jewellery design from east London-based design practice Studiomama. “I had a bit of wire that I was just bending around my finger,” explains Jack Mama, co-founder of the practice, “when for some reason I ended up bending it into a rectangular shape. Suddenly, it became a viewfinder.” The piece, aptly christened Viewfinder, can be worn around the neck, but is designed to also be slipped onto a finger where it becomes a reference to camera viewfinders – an analogue visual frame through which to look at the world. “We wanted that connection to camera language of the past,” Mama explains, “and something that could go back to different ways of seeing and looking.” With the rise of digital image culture, Viewfinder takes pleasure in steering the field back into something resolutely physical – lifted up to the eye, it provides a silver framing through which to perceive the world around you. “It’s a little invitation to stop and look, particularly when everyone is engaged with the digital all the time now with phones.”
Studiomama’s viewfinder ring references analogue cameras (image: Two Piont Five).
Viewfinder is one component of a new collection designed by Mama and his partner Nina Tolstrup, which is exhibited this week as part of Step by Step, an Shoreditch Design Triangle installation by Birmingham-based jewellery brand Point Two Five. Launched by designer Paddy Bek during the 2024 London Design Festival, Point Two Five collaborates with designers and artists whose work typically sits outside of jewellery, inviting them to create designs that might suggest new treatments of material or functionality.
“The jewellery that we make is not fine jewellery, and it's not cheap jewellery – it's what the industry would call demi-fine jewellery,” explains Bek. “It sits somewhere in the middle, which is a space on the high street that, on the whole, has been super boring – everything feels exactly the same, telling the same stories that have been told for decades or even centuries.” In response to this, Bek has built a company that introduces new voices to the field, commissioning industrial and graphic designers such as Jamie Wolfond, Theodora Alfredsdottir, Sebastian Bergne and Daniel Eatock to create works that introduce an alternative impetus to jewellery – Eatock’s Bic Pen Cap, for instance, casts the familiar form of a cheap biro lid in solid gold. “I thought that bringing in designers with a conceptual eye to that space would be interesting,” Bek says, “as I can't think of a product that’s more fertile ground for telling stories than jewellery.”
The viewfinder ring can also be worn upside down as a necklace (image: Point Two Five).
For 2025, the brand’s one-year anniversary, Bek has commissioned Studiomama to expand Point Two Five’s collection with a series of new works. “I was looking for a bit of humour in the collection,” Bek explains, “which is what I felt they could bring.” It is a reasonable supposition. Mama and Tolstrup have become known across the industry for designs that pair material and technical ingenuity with wit and warmth, creating objects that invite new perspectives on familiar forms: elegant furniture made from locally sourced waste wooden pallets; a book detailing natural animal forms that serendipitously arise in stones gathered on a beach; and a bench designed for a historic home to prompt reflection on its architecture, whose shape recalls a harpsichord also found in the space. Uniting all of their work is an interest in altering how we look at the world – waste becomes desirable, the everyday becomes enchanted, and objects slip between typologies and forms with gleeful abandon. The collection for Point Two Five, unsurprisingly, picks up on this same interest in engineering perspectival shifts in how we look at the world around us. “Thinking about that is a theme that runs through everything we do,” Mama says.
Studiomama’s Other Half collection uses curved wire and reflective silver to create jewellery that forms a love heart when seen at the correct angle (image: Point Two Five).
Alongside Viewfinder, the studio has developed Other Half, a jewellery series that makes use of the reflectiveness of silver to create a visual sleight of hand. A curved wire has been soldered onto a polished disc of argentium silver alloy, reflecting back a mirrored image of the wire at the point at which the two metal elements connect. Seen from the correct angle, the wire and its visual double arc together to form a love heart – a reference to birthday and Valentine’s Day gifts that Mama has made for Tolstrup in the past. “When Paddy approached us, the first thing that came to my mind was that I make something for Nina every year, because she's really anti buying gifts from shops,” Mama explains. “I discovered very early in our relationship not to buy things, so started making them instead. I experimented and quite often would make something with wire. One time I found a mirror and managed to bend some wire around it until I saw the reflection of the heart.”
While the idea behind Other Half is simple, its execution as jewellery is not. The design needs a perfectly flat sheet of polished metal for its perspectival trick to work, but also requires that this sheet be soldered on both side to affix the wire and the functional elements of the various rings, necklaces and bangles that the collection includes. “But the more that you work a flat sheet, the less flat it becomes,” Bek notes, adding that the heating required to work the metal can also result in a fire stain – a bruise-like discolouration that disrupts the mirror polish. As such, Other Half has required heavy prototyping by Bek from his studio in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, a square kilometre of the city responsible for more than 40 per cent of the UK’s annual jewellery output – a point of pride for the city, in spite of the threat of rising rents and declining numbers of makers. “It’s a super condensed set of fabricators, larger manufacturers, independent makers, and even a jewellery school,” Bek adds, with Point Two Five producing all of its designs in conjunction with this local network, which was awarded World Craft City Status earlier this year. “The capacity of what they're able to do there, and the skills that are available is something that I liked the idea of getting eyeballs onto,” he says. “I grew up in Birmingham where my dad was a maker and I remember him saying that if you couldn’t get it made in Birmingham, you're not going to be able to get it made anywhere.”
Studiomama’s jewellery displayed at Step by Step, an exhibition at Shoreditch’s Wax Building for London Design Festival (image: Point Two Five).
With Step by Step, an installation coming a year after the brand’s debut, Point Two Five hopes to take this communication around the value of making and craft further. Hosted in the stairwells of Shoreditch’s Wax Building, the exhibition has been designed by Dean Brown of London-based practice Brown Office, who has developed display units for the brand’s jewellery. Responding to the context of the Wax Building’s brick walls, Brown has created brick modules 3D-printed from PLA, executed in colours that recall those of naturally fired clay, but dialled up to more cheerful, cartoon-like versions of the tones. The resulting bricks walk the line between reality and artificiality, another shift in perspective that Bek describes as “appearing to gently extrude from the wall”. Brown’s design, which incorporates concealed bike lights to offer illumination without the need for wired lighting in a tight hall space, offers a platform to display Point Two Five’s full collection of jewellery, as well as a new series of “Love Lines” – adaptations of the wire sculptures that Mama creates annually for Tolstrup, and which speak of his enthusiasm for spontaneous craft and making. “They’re little sculptural freestanding things, which have been dotted all over our house over the year,” Mama explains, but which will now enter the wider world, nestled atop the displays developed by Brown to showcase Point Two Five’s work. “Dean’s displays are little architectures in their own right,” Bek notes, with the constrained space of the stairwell space intended to create a sense of intimacy with designs that are, by their nature, themselves immediate and personal.
Studiomama’s Lovelines scupltures are adaptations of the wire gifts that Mama creates for Tolstrup each year (image: Point Two Five).
Mama’s delight in the pleasures of craft and making, coupled with Brown’s contextual and material driven approach towards exhibition design, captures Point Two Five’s wider ethos as the brand celebrates its first anniversary. "My design career started in furniture, but I never really quite got on with the scale of it,” explains Bek. “There was a little too much engineering for me.” Instead, jewellery has offered him an opportunity to create small-scale forms that are loaded with meaning, and which provide a platform the skills and expertise present in the Jewellery Quarter in which Point Two Five has made its home. “Jewellery is a natural thing to experiment with and the type of design that tells really great stories,” Bek explains. “And that’s really what it’s about. How can we tell stories, whether it be through wit, material, or the ways in which things are made?”