‘I wanted to make pieces of jewellery that felt like they were oozing with life,’ says Hannah Martin on the eve of the launch of her tenth jewellery collection, The Perfect Drug. ‘There is something primal about the immediacy of them. Their audacity. Getting to the essence of who and what we are - flesh, bone, skin. Real. Human. Messy and beautiful and full of life.’
Martin has brought this viscerality to her jewellery since launching her eponymous brand in 2006, jointly celebrating both punkish motifs and traditional craftsmanship. It is a philosophy she builds on here with a return to rebellious form and an embrace of bolts and hinges, as well as introducing new materials including a precious chainmail which drapes around the curves of the body.
‘I was looking for a new palette of texture, a new way of using gold to create sensuality,’ Martin adds. ‘The fluidity and intimacy of the liquid chainmail was my answer. It was so exciting for me - to find this new ‘thing’, a new language with metal.There is so much to enjoy about working with it - the sexiness, the softness, the way it feels on your skin. It has opened so many possibilities for me and feels really fresh, in the context of my work. The challenges were endless. But that’s of course always what I get excited about - although I am not sure my team would agree here. It took us over six months to develop a way to make this successfully. At the same time as developing the chain mail itself we also had the challenge of working out how to work with it - how to secure the studs and different elements to it, how to integrate it into the designs and combine it with other materials. It really was an odyssey of engineering.’
She draws from a litany of references, from Brancusi and Man Ray to Tom of Finland, Robert Mapplethorpe and Linder Sterling, in creating a sensual marriage of hard and soft, curved and angular, throughout. ‘In essence this is what I was trying to capture with the design codes. I think the juxtaposition of soft and hard, masculine and feminine, is something that I always have in my work - and perhaps even more so in this collection. I’ve been describing it as sitting in the space between punk and leather daddy. The voluptuousness of the spheres, in contrast with the hard studs and straps. I wanted every piece to be something that you wanted to touch with your skin, stroke, and play with. There is a big element in my design process, as there always is actually, about stripping things back. Getting to the bare essentials of what each piece is. So that they feel direct and immediate, a bit in your face, but also with beauty, sensuality and subtlety.’
