Ella Fearon-Low – a treasure trove of waiting-to-happen moments


“As I’ve gone along, my life has become more complicated… and it’s almost like out of the darkness of those moments, and the darkness of the world around us, it’s this quiet act of rebellion to create work that is joyful and fun and maybe not too serious,” For Goldsmiths’ Stories, journalist and writer Kate Youde speaks with Ella Fearon-Low about embracing what makes you happy, creating joyful art in response to the darkness outside, and delving into the treasure trove of waiting-to-happen moments.

Ella Fearon-Lowe in her studio ©Paul Reed Photography

From glass canisters of pine cones, driftwood and seed heads to labelled ice cream tubs of beach finds and smashed windscreen, the garden studio at Ella Fearon-Low’s suburban south London home exposes the artist jeweller’s fascination with diverse materials. A work bench holds a pile of balsa wood; a set of drawers is dedicated to offcuts of Lucite, a staple of her vibrant designs. She pulls out plastic trays lined with different shapes, sizes and colours of pearls, and later shows me her collection of shards of antique ceramics in the adjacent shed.

One of Ella’s favourite as yet unused materials is broken-up abalone shells set in resin, introduced to her by the Japanning lacquerwork artist Tuesday Riddell. “I’ve been thinking, ‘Wouldn’t that look amazing behind some hand-carved Lucite with some beautiful grey pearls on top?’” says Ella. “I am a treasure trove of waiting-to-happen moments.”

Many of the self-confessed magpie’s finds serve purely as inspiration, rather than making it into her work. But Ella’s seemingly effortless blending of humble materials with precious metals and gems in playful yet sophisticated brooches and earrings has won her fans among collectors.

Her pair of paisley pattern-inspired Araish and Jaipur brooches entered the Goldsmiths’ Company’s permanent collection earlier this year, and she is pushing her practice at this year’s Goldsmiths’ Fair with an installation that blurs jewellery and sculpture. Both are exciting milestones for a jeweller whose entry into the industry was by her own admission somewhat “accidental”.  

Left: Araish, 2024, Oxidised silver, 9ct gold, 24ct gold foil, Lucite, freshwater pearl, lapis lazuli, steel | Right: Jaipur, 2024, Oxidised silver, 9ct gold, Lucite, garnet, steel. ©Jocelyn Low

That said, creativity is in Ella’s blood. Her artist grandparents ran a successful gallery in Cardiff; her father was a civil engineer who specialised in designing significant bridges. Her mother, who worked in interior design before studying art history, would rent out a bedroom in the family home in southwest London to costume and theatre design students from what is now Wimbledon College of Arts. 

“I grew up with a very sophisticated understanding of art,” says Ella, whose studio is decorated with a woodcut by the printmaker Eileen Cooper, a small print by the artist Mark Hearld and a large mixed-media work by a former Wimbledon student. “Family holidays were house swaps to Sienna… As children, my sister and I had probably seen more Renaissance art than most people get to see in their whole lifetime.” 

She initially pursued her own creative path, undertaking a degree in history of modern art, design and film at Northumbria University. But a year in, she found the subject didn’t have the same pull on her as the international development work she had undertaken by the Tibetan border in Nepal during a gap year between school and university. 

“Even as a very young child, I was the one who said, ‘Don’t get me Christmas presents, let’s give [the money] to the UN,” she recalls. “I was the one organising the very first Comic Relief fundraiser at school. I was always doing stuff that had a social outcome and that carried on to adulthood.” 

She quit her course and secured a place at SOAS University of London on a degree in development and South Asian studies. Ella, who later completed a masters in communities, organisations and social change, worked for NGOs for more than a decade, travelling regularly to different countries from London. 

It was the arrival of her second child - and what she saw as the logistical impossibility of juggling her travel with caring for two young children - that prompted the change of career. Watching daytime television while breastfeeding, she saw the same narrative recur in relocation-themed shows - that people had postponed doing the things that made them happy. “I thought, if I’m not going to be able to do this career that I really love… maybe I go for this life that everyone else seems to wait till the end of their life to have,” she says. 

So she and her husband Nic took on an allotment, and at the same time Ella realised she missed being creative. She looked into sculpture, ceramics and jewellery, with the latter winning out because, like sculpture, it is three-dimensional and can involve many different materials, but is on a smaller, more manageable scale. “And I thought, perhaps misguidedly, that it would be a lot more commercial,” she says.

Her childhood love of making also informed her choice. Finding written homework boring, she would craft three-dimensional objects. A history project about the Celts became a scale model of a thatched hut with ovens, cooking pots and furs to be slept on. “I did a textured plaster base, which I spray painted so it looked like earth, and then underneath I’d made a little section out of which you could pull my rather flimsy written project,” she says.

In 2012, when in her mid-30s, Ella enrolled on a new two-year jewellery certificate at Morley College London, an adult learning centre. On completion, she took short courses to develop her experience working in different materials, before redoing the second year. After finishing the course in the summer, she set herself the deadline of 1st December 2016 to launch her first two collections at a pre-Christmas show in the garden studio of her parents’ house.

Today, Ella continues to hand make small collections, as well as bespoke commissions. With a brooch, she starts with the central shape, carving this from Lucite before polishing it to give a smooth and shiny finish similar to enamel. She then draws around the shape 20 times to try out different silhouettes for the silver surround, which often features a scalloped edge or diamond motif. Once she has decided on the final design, she will cut the recycled silver and polish it, before either oxidising or gold plating the metal. She then adds her finishing touches: typically pearls and/or coral beads.

The linchpin of Ella’s pieces are her signature rivets that hold these layers of materials together. She draws on “patience and nerve” to form them from gold wire. Having drilled holes in her piece, she feeds the filed and sanded wire through, and hammers the ends to create domes that secure it in place. She turns the jewel regularly to ensure the wire sits evenly on both sides.

The unique visual language of her work draws on the art, architecture and design that infused her childhood. “A lot of [my] early work would almost be postmodernism meets Edwardian meets Elizabethan,” she suggests. “Or [art] deco meets Renaissance.” She says that, in a bid to be “taken seriously”, early collections overtly referenced historical detailing and colours, and had a “sombre grandeur”. 

But her style has evolved as her confidence has grown. While historical visual influences still underpin her work, her aesthetic has become more playful, as evidenced by cake, sea creature and circus-themed collections. She has “amped up” her use of colour, shape and layering, and is more focused on texture and finish. 

Chocolate Box Brooches 2021, Ella Fearon-Low - ©Jocelyn Low

“As I’ve gone along, my life has become more complicated… and it’s almost like out of the darkness of those moments, and the darkness of the world around us, it’s this quiet act of rebellion to create work that is joyful and fun and maybe not too serious,” she says. “It’s almost that I thought I would make this very political, earnest work when I first started that would have deep meaning, and I would be able to talk about its story, but actually it’s almost landed up being the opposite of that. Instead of making work about Gaza, I’m making work that is the opposite of Gaza but almost in response to that.” 

Ella has always thought of jewellery as an art form and in recent years has developed her practice to make sculptural pieces that can displayed as decorative objects when not being worn. She mounted last year’s Juggle brooches on colourful wooden stands.  

At this year’s Goldsmiths’ Fair she is pushing the concept further for a site-specific installation that will see her adorn the Goldsmiths’ Hall with “jewellery”. These sculptural elements will foreground one of the drivers behind her work: the question of where value lies in a piece of jewellery. “I’ve gone down lots of little avenues behind the scenes during the time that I’ve been building my reputation,” she says. “And Jewels for the Hall is going to land up being an outlet for lots of those ideas and material experimentations.”  

Pluvia Laetus is a hanging installation of more than a hundred hand-carved and colourfully-decorated balsa wood lozenges, teardrop shapes and seed forms, suspended from an archway above a mirror. Ella has also created wearable versions: 10 large balsa brooches. 

The Dreamers is a series of four brooches and a pendant that will sit under glass cloches. Ella has gilded the back of these clear Lucite pieces, and the Lucite discs on which they sit, and drawn nature-inspired pattens into the gold leaf.  

Three Queens, which takes its name from a brooch in Ella’s first collection, Rococo, is a series of three characterful sculptural forms created in collaboration with the wood-turning duo Ash & Plumb. Decorated dry wood bases and finials bookend charred and polished green wood bodies, inspired by the power of the chess piece but taking visual cues from everything from Roman to modernist sculpture. 

Finally, for Offerings, Ella has created platters of gilded plaster gifts for sculptures in the Grade I-listed hall, inspired by the three wise men’s gold, frankincense and myrrh. She used shells and broken ceramic pieces scavenged from beaches to imprint pattern and texture onto the clay used to form the mould.  

Some of her collected treasures have found their moment. 


Written by Kate Youde for Goldsmiths’ Stories | Images of Ella and her Studio © Paul Read | Images of Ella’s Brooches ©Jocelyn Low | Images of Three Queens being turned ©Ash & Plumb

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