Born from 500 years of Scottish heritage, the jewelry created by Ellis Mhairi Cameron takes a modern perspective on the treasures of antiquity. The London-based Scot utilizes fair trade gold and sustainably harvested diamonds to create jewelry which has quickly attracted attention from some of fashion’s most famous.
Growing up in the Highlands of Scotland, Ellis fell in love with the country’s storied history, ancient buildings, along with the rugged sea and landscape. This history lives on below the land in places such as the Cameron family farm. Ellis and her family have excavated relics of an age past – segments of rings, vessels, knives and swords all buried centuries ago. These treasures have inspired Ellis’s most recent collections’, the rough edges, asymmetric settings and visible texture evoking a feudal era of kings and queens, appearing to wearers as if they’d been unearthed along with a treasure trove themselves.
Ellis relocated from the Scottish Highlands to Glasgow in 2010 to begin an art foundation course. Although she originally planned to pursue sculpture or painting, she discovered jewelry-making during her studies and quickly became captivated by its possibilities. For Ellis, jewelry combined elements of all the disciplines she loved, allowing her to collage and paint in her sketchbooks, then transition into crafting small-scale three-dimensional “sculptures” through her jewelry work.
Ellis uses traditional techniques, such as hand carving and casting, to give her pieces their signature erosive aesthetic. Diamonds play a key role in this collection of necklaces, earrings, and rings. Antique-cut and icy-white baguette diamonds, resembling standing stones and occasionally placed upside down to create a softer, rain-like shimmer, are embedded in richly textured molten gold, evoking a sense of ancient craftsmanship. “Using brilliant-cut or more modern stones wouldn’t create the same impression,” Cameron explains. “The piece might still be beautiful, but it wouldn’t carry the same story or emotion.”
It is this story and emotion that emanates from Ellis’s unique gold rings. The one-of-a-kind Legacy Cocktail Ring features an oval, soft white diamond inlaid in a pavé set diamond frame which sits atop a British-supplied 14 karat recycled-gold band. The ring is decidedly ancient in appearance, crowned with what the Financial Times’ Kate Finnegan calls “a medieval statement of a jewel.”
Equally magnificent is the V-Shaped Scatter Ring. More understated than the Legacy Cocktail Ring, the ring includes nine soft red baguette cut diamonds set with an organic, textured bezel that accentuates the fluidity of the molten 14 karat gold used to cast the piece. Again, Ellis manages to create a piece which appears antique and organic, summoning visions of the windswept Scottish plains from which it was inspired.
A Registered Fairtrade Goldsmith and an Ambassador of Fairtrade Gold, Ellis studied for a BA in Jewelry & Silversmithing at The Glasgow School of Art, before completing an MA in Jewelry Design at Central Saint Martins. In 2021, Ellis was awarded Young Jewelry Designer of the Year at the UK Jewelry Awards. Ellis’s work has also been featured in Vogue and Forbes, a testament to her originality and masterful craftsmanship.
