Emerging Creative: Obtuse Jewellery

WORDS Malibongwe Tyilo

Fine Art and Jewellery Design graduate, Lynne Avis, was selected as one of the 40 young talents to exhibit as part of Design Indaba’s Emerging Creatives programme for 2016, where she showed pieces from her label, Obtuse Jewellery.

Her creations function as adornments, as well as objects of meditation. In particular, her latest range, titled the Kinetic Collection, features three ring designs that invite interaction through their movement. You can play with Reflection and Rotation, two of the designs, by twirling them around your fingers and fiddling with them, allowing the mind to “contemplate the immaterial” while the hands are preoccupied with the physical. The collection was inspired by a personal story: Lynne was consistently scolded by her father for fiddling at the dinner table, and she felt “the need to legitimise her habit,” so she designed the Kinetic Collection, which according to her is “designed for the fiddler and the hands that cannot be kept still. To be spun, shaken and played with against all good manners.”

The third design, which is the Clandestine ring, takes its inspiration from 16^th century rings, when jewellery was made with hidden compartments, “hiding locks of secret lovers and poisons for hated enemies,” she explains.

Lynne’s background, which includes Fine Art, has put her in a position to base her jewellery design on conceptual narratives and she creates each individual piece in the range herself. Through Obtuse Jewellery, she designs collections that not only deviate from the norm, but also expand definitions of contemporary jewellery while retaining – and even adding to – their functionality.

See more on Instagram, as well as at facebook.com/obtusejewellerydesign. Email info@obtusejewellery.com for more information.