When thinking of a new design, English jeweler Sia Taylor compares the process to coalescing emotion. Both granular and anything but, her approach is akin to capturing a daydream. Within each delicate piece of her handmade collection she forges mood, movement and memory in gold. Sia’s touch is organic, almost painterly. This is a beauty understated—akin to a breeze across flaxen wheat, greenery speckled with morning dew, the fluttering of golden leaves in fall.
The collection brought into Santa Fe Dry Goods comprises two of Sia’s core offerings: Dots & A Golden Meadow. The former is her most familiar: an exploration of how gold reflects light on skin. These pieces are minimal, classic, and intended to hang just below the collarbone, characterized by 18K disks strung along a fine chain. The latter, as suggested by its title, is intended to capture the essence of grasslands in late summer. Strung with organically-shaped, overlapping gold beads, these pieces capture nature’s ephemeral bohemia.
Each bead is melted, hammered and shaped by hand. At less than three millimeters in diameter, Sia’s is an intensive process on a minute scale. While she has long been called to the meticulous, her fascination with small things peaked while volunteering for a research project in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Wandering amidst the lush fronds of paper reeds and silvergrass, the delicate beauty of her surroundings captured her imagination. This formative experience comprises the bedrock of her inspiration today, diligently fed by long walks in the English countryside.
“Every collection is a story, something like a dream, abstract, but reminiscent of a feeling or a sensation. The shapes we craft in gold are the language which tells the story.”
–Sia Taylor
