Mystery and Magic: The Art and Animals of Bibi van der Velden
Bibi van der Velden grew up between the Netherlands and the English countryside, spending time in the sculpture studio of her mother, Michèle Deiters, and gaining a sense of form that would drive her future creative practice as an artist and jeweller. For Goldsmiths’ Stories, van der Velden talked to writer Kate Matthams about approaching jewellery-making from a sculptural perspective, working with sustainable and often unusual materials, and the creation of her exquisitely rendered and jewelled menagerie.
“Ants should be celebrated, they’re very hard little workers,” Bibi van der Velden tells me. “They’re like the underdog of the animal world, they deserve a little sprinkling of fairy dust, too.” The artist and jeweller is referring to Memento Mori, the 2019 fine jewellery collection through which she explored the beauty to be found in decay, and the continuous cycle of life. By juxtaposing the grotesque with the sublime in the tradition of the Dutch Masters — in this case, insects crawling over flowers and plants — she was able to portray the timelessness of Nature’s lifecycle, alongside the inevitability of death. In her jewels, gemstone-studded millepedes slide around fingers, ants scuttle around the neck towards a faded bloom, and a tiny rose quartz slug slithers up an ear to reach the feathery petals of a tulip. “The prowling leopards and cheeky monkeys have proved more popular in my collections,” she laughs, but there is undeniable charm in her bejewelled ants; that most industrious, and often overlooked, of insects.
Trained as an artist in Italy and the Netherlands, van der Velden grew up between the Netherlands and the English countryside, spending time in the sculpture studio of her mother, Michèle Deiters, where she gained a sense of form that would drive her future creative practice. In 2006, she set up her namesake jewellery house, hand-carving on a different scale, to sculpt jewels from sustainable, and often unusual, materials. “You can put more thought and stories into sculpting,” she says, of her work making art as one half of the mother-daughter creative team BibiMichèle. “The process of doing, starting with a lump of stone and being inspired, takes you on a journey. I approach jewellery-making from a sculptural perspective, I want each piece to be an object in itself, not to only come alive when worn — I love the idea of pieces lying on a nightstand at the end of the day, looking beautiful.” The two facets of her practice brush together at times; forms are often generous, rounded and feminine, with Nature as an inexhaustible and ever-changing muse.
These days, she has become best known for her exquisitely rendered jewelled menagerie. The tiny, wearable sculptures have the power to win over jewellery fans who would not usually consider animal jewellery, but whose minds change once the serpentine tail of a golden alligator is wound around a wrist, or a tiny seahorse curled into an earlobe. Yet it wasn’t a conscious choice to focus on animals: “in some cases, it had a lot to do with the materials,” she explains. “When I started using 50,000-year-old mammoth tusk from Siberia early on in my career, I was drawn to depicting prehistoric creatures like lizards. It made me think about why they had been around forever, and they became a metaphor for survival.” Mammoth still features heavily in her collections, sometimes as smooth eggs studded with gemstones, or intricately carved into a scaly sea snake, or the domed head of a dolphin. “I love that I can preserve it as part of history. It’s my favourite material, and my nemesis in many ways, but I can’t stop using it — it has mystery and magic.”
From Cartier’s panther to Bulgari’s Serpenti snakes, animal jewellery has long been a cornerstone of the jeweller’s craft and van der Velden’s playful monkeys and majestic lions are often figurative, a more literal interpretation of Nature than collections like the elegantly abstract Smoke, with its complex swirls of metal around darkly mysterious stones. “Sometimes my jewellery is direct representation, but there are always touches of humour,” she says. Lavender quartz jellyfish drift by in the Sea Creatures collection, while mermaids’ tails splash into jumbo pearls: “I love the fairytale element. You can take liberties as an artist or designer, but there should also be something that puts it all into context for people and triggers memories or feelings. I hope to evoke a sense of childhood and nostalgia and give people the freedom to run wild.”
Van der Velden’s own free-running imagination finds expression in a creative process rooted in the jeweller’s craft. From rich mood boards and sketchbooks brimming with notes and pictures, emerge ideas for jewels that go on to be carved in wax in her canal-side Amsterdam studio, before being cast and set with gems; maybe her favourite green-blue toned tourmalines, emeralds or creamy baroque pearls in peacock hues. Each day, she ring-fences time away from the more quotidian demands of running her jewellery businesses - alongside her label, she also helms Auverture, the online vintage and sustainable contemporary jewellery platform - to “get my hands dirty” and nourish her creativity. “I’m really hanging onto that. I think it’s essential to see and feel the hand of the maker in objects. We’re not averse to using technology - we 3D-scanned my original smoke sculpture for the Opium ring - but all the actual pieces must be based on hand-carving,” she insists. “It’s delicate and time-consuming, but very much worth it.”
One series born of the materials themselves but with equally sculptural results, is the Scarab collection, for which she uses real beetle wings. Van der Velden was in Thailand, where the beetles are eaten as a delicacy, when she first saw scarab wings on market stalls and began to explore how she could use them. As a decorative material, scarab wings have long been used in adornment; beetle-wing art and embroidery has been practiced across Asia throughout history, and there are Victorian-era dresses in the V&A Museum today detailed with scarab wing sequins, which still retain their lustre. They are mesmerising, and “their iridescence cannot be replicated,” she tells me. “This is where Nature wins - with all our expertise and technique, we can’t reproduce a scarab wing and all its extraordinary colours. I also liked the recycling element to that collection - I can’t do anything about the scarabs themselves being eaten, but I can do something with the discarded parts.” It’s a waste product made magnificent, studded with gems and clustered at the earlobe, or half-open and ready to fly off a pendant, revealing a gemstone-striped insect body beneath.
As a collector of “weird things” since childhood, she has always found satisfaction in upcycling found objects and materials. “Making something simple out of gold or setting a diamond in something elevates it and makes it beautiful. A piece of plastic found on the beach can become something precious.” As such, she prefers to use materials that are already above ground; most of her gold is mined from discarded technology or recycled jewellery given a second life from a single, trusted provider. As many of the stones she uses as possible, are antique and bespoke projects that repurpose heirloom jewellery are amongst her favourites. When she needs to source particular stones, she likes to use smaller suppliers and personal contacts: “I only buy opals from a single mine in Australia, and Greenland rubies — I need to know exactly where they come from; with larger suppliers there’s no way of telling what you’re really getting. I like the idea of slowly cultivating a trusted network.” She would love to see a mine-to-market system, whereby consumers can know exactly who pulled the gemstone from the earth.
Because while Nature can be mined for both materials and inspiration, there is also a great deal of respect in the way she represents the animals that inspire her and the environments in which they live. Van der Velden’s beasts and birds are dynamic with movement, you can feel the breeze in a mane and the waves coursing over scales. “I’m very sensitive to my surroundings,” says the artist, who moved with her family from Amsterdam to Portugal in 2019, a few months after her young daughter, Charlie, finished treatment for leukaemia. Washed clean by coastal life after her illness, growing their own food and immersing themselves in Nature, the family is now thriving, and the natural environment has enriched her art. “My surroundings are an integral part of my creative practice. Part of the reason we moved to Portugal was the ocean, I love surfing and being in the water, but I’ll never underestimate its power. It’s very dualistic; on the one hand you want to be a part of it, but at the same time, you know it cannot be tamed. I can understand how people make offerings to the gods of the ocean in some cultures.”
As the moon drags the tides in and out, the sun and rain nurture green shoots that eventually fade and crumble back into the earth, perhaps it’s the wonder of observing something bigger that pulls her back to representing living creatures through her art. The passing of time is there again, in harnessing gems made in the earth or sea, for jewels that will be worn for generations. “But this is also our undoing; this desire to capture what we see in nature and keep it under a glass dome. The collector impulse,” she adds. But with their exquisite monkeys caught mid-swing and rearing elephants, I doubt her own collectors would agree.
Written by Kate Matthams for Goldsmiths’ Stories | Images courtesy of Bibi van der Velden