Touch Stones by Charlotte De Syllas

I take great pride in failing Charlotte De Syllas’s lapidary course, even though the famed jeweller doesn’t actually give out grades. I gave myself that F quite happily after spending five days in Charlotte’s idyllic Norfolk workshop playing with stone, learning how to saw and grind, carve and polish, and realise that shaping nature’s hardest minerals into beautiful forms is not easy. I took to it like a duck to architecture. And that’s fine. 
I first came across Charlotte’s work when I saw one of her twisted tourmaline rings at Goldsmith’s Hall in London as a young jewellery journalist. I knew then that stone carving was an artform that held my gaze more than the usual jewellery crafts, and that de Syllas was a master. The way she can form a gentle scroll from colour blending pink to blue tourmaline or honey-coloured heliodor, then encase them in bindings of soft gold, or slot shapes of black and white jade together like beautifully complicated puzzle pieces makes her work instantly recognisable, despite individual works being entirely disparate from each other. 
Despite decades of hands-on experience, Charlotte is still a proponent of trial and error, forever experimenting, wondering, testing the process. The magic she brings as a teacher is to push her students to be unafraid of failure. “Why not?” she often asks a student who hesitates to attempt an idea. “You’ll never know unless you try.” It’s why students, now experts like Lin Cheung have pushed beyond their limits to create soft drapes from Guatemalan jade, or this journalist attempted a hare’s ear from sardonyx, gently guided by Charlotte’s suggestions. 
Just look at the breadth of Charlotte’s work - a breastplate-sized display of a magpie’s head and wings from five different materials to a small hololith (a ring carved from a single stone) of a Hoopoe bird from black jade, sporting a white jadeite feather crown. None of these artworks can be achieved without daring experimentation, something which Charlotte seems to embody effortlessly. From brutal chunks of stone to whirling worlds to adorn the body, her artistry is like no other’s.

- Annabel Davidson, Journalist and Editor of Vanity Fair on Jewellery