The Designer
Not the conventional jeweler, Jayne Moore is - first and foremost - an artist. From her earliest days, “hands-on” creativity has been her most natural form of expression, and throughout her education, and career in fashion, art and movement have played a prevalent part.
Scouted as a model at 16, she was quickly catapulted into the fashion world, and, on completion of a vocational degree in art and design, she spent the next few years modeling between London, Milan, and Paris, which proved to be a fast paced education in Fashion, style, and creativity at its most eccentric.
At 20 Jayne followed work to New York City, and it was here, in a city thriving with inspiration and artistic possibilities, that she finally found not only her “home”, but also the balance of runway to canvas, and of a life in front of the camera, to one of anonymity at the work bench.
Having studied and worked with a wide range of method and medium for years, she found herself consistently fascinated – throughout all her work – by light and texture, particularly of that found organically in nature.
Jayne never had jewelry in mind as a profession, but it was whilst studying at The School of Visual Arts in New York City that metal work caught her eye - it being such a natural and yet malleable source of reflections and refraction – and this set her off on a new artistic tangent. It was not so much jewelry to Jayne as wearable art, with both light and texture being used to play off the delicacy and intricacies of the human body.
In other words, art adorned.
Having studied metalsmithing and lost wax carving at the School of Visual Arts, she then moved on to the Liloveve school of jewelry for a term, before relocating back to London where she studied at The London School of Jewelry in Hatton Garden - particularly stone-setting, metal-finishing and surface techniques. On her return to her beloved NYC, she discovered the shared artist space Brooklyn Metal Works, and took further classes there alongside the working jeweler team. She now splits her bench-time between the Brooklyn Metal Works creative community, the hustle of 47th street, Manhattan’s Jewelry District, and her own Chelsea Studio.
Despite the immediate attention her pieces received, Jayne for many years remained ever the artist, focused on creative ideas, without any consideration to business - especially as it seemed (thanks now to computer-assisted technology) to have become an industry lacking in originality, skill, or appreciation. It was simply due to the demand from her inner circles, and within the fashion industry, that TER ever came about.
Stubbornly insisting on creating everything herself from the logo, the branding, the packaging, to every single individual piece - Jayne has manifested her vision, from concept through to creation. Every piece is the personal design of the artist, hand-carved and curated by her.
Still, to this day, every single piece is made by Jayne, from which molds are made for small batch production, every batch closely monitored by her, every stage in the process overseen by her, and every piece hand-finished by her tight team that she has been working with since her early student days, to who she remains loyal.
Jayne herself says: “It was quite heart breaking to realize how much could be done on computers, and manufactured overnight in far-flung places, and so cheaply! How could I even compete? I had spent six months hand-carving the most elaborate and infuriating wrist cuff as a gift for a friend (The Journey, above), being far too ambitious with the design, and adding elaborate detail as I went, as the project evolved. It was a gift, as an expression of the beauty found in a particularly tough journey she had been going through - and it mattered!
I was living in London at the time, and - on finally taking the finished product to be cast – the Casting Company could not believe I had carved it entirely by hand. I had to show photos of the process to prove it! They then told me that I could have drawn it in CAD (a computer assisted design program) and a 3D printer would have printed it for me. Dior had recently done something similar.
It was in that moment that I realized it wasn’t that I was unable to compete with computers but that they could never compete with me. I had created that particular item millimetre by millimetre, as it had naturally occurred in my mind’s eye, the detail and intricacies evolving as I carved. So many of my pieces are precisely this, the product of serendipitous error or discovery whilst exploring a technique or pushing the metal or wax to a new limit. Computers can’t do that.
I don’t bang pieces out; I wear everything to exhaustion and tweak it until I have fallen in love with it. Only then is it ready for production. My team is all here in New York, I go and meddle in the whole process, asking questions and exploring possibilities, learning, learning, learning. Every single piece is scrutinized by myself. I was once told that this wasn’t practical, and I've enjoyed proving otherwise.
Anyone can commission jewelry these days, in fact the market is over-saturated, stretched to bursting point. But this is my art, and I think that can be felt in every piece. I hope you love wearing it as much as I do creating it. ”
