Gabrielle Greiss was wearing a silver cuff that looked like claws clutching her right wrist. Her short silver necklace also resembled claws, this time reaching for the dangling two-inch figure of a rodent.
“It’s ‘The Lion and the Rat,’” Ms. Greiss, 51, explained recently during an interview at her apartment-atelier. She was referring to one of the fables by the 17th-century French author Jean de La Fontaine, the inspirations for about two dozen of her limited-edition jewelry sets.
At least it is two dozen “so far,” she said with a smile. And, “you have to buy the whole fable — you can’t separate the pieces.”
Ms. Greiss generally works in silver- and gold-plated bronze, a material she gravitated to because artists such as the French sculptor Claude Lalanne traditionally use it to make jewelry. For one-of-a-kind pieces, she recently has begun incorporating some of the semiprecious stones she has collected over the years. “The stones are very specific, and the setting has to be created for each one,” she said.
For example, her Animal in the Moon necklace depicts a golden mouse standing on a crescent moon against a background of ocean jasper, which looks like a lunar horizon (48,000 euros, or about $50,000). The piece also uses green amethyst in star-shaped settings and moody, silvery gemstones such as gray pearls and star ruby.
Ms. Greiss, who grew up in Munich, said her earliest creative impulses came during weekend visits to her maternal grandmother, who encouraged her and her cousins to use the pearls, rhinestones, silk ribbons and other bits that were kept in a large wardrobe at her home in Bavaria. “We made lots of stuff with whatever she had,” she said.
After earning a master’s degree in fashion from Central Saint Martins in London, she designed for such labels as Martine Sitbon, Sonia Rykiel and Chloé, but after more than two decades in the industry, she turned to jewelry in 2021. “I won’t say that I’ll never do clothes again,” she said. “It’s just that the change came naturally because I always wanted the time to go slow and make things without thinking about fashion seasons.”
In 2022, Ms. Greiss learned a casting method called the lost-wax process at Elemento, a private jewelry school in Paris. Andrea Piñeros, the school’s co-founder, said: “Her capacity to work with volumes is exceptional. She turned out to be very gifted at this, and very quickly developed an aesthetic universe.” In the past few years Ms. Greiss also has taken classes in drawing, painting and sculpting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Ms. Greiss was one of the 15 jewelers chosen to exhibit at Joya, a jewelry fair that debuted in November in Monaco. Vanessa Margowski, the fair’s co-founder, said, “When you see one of Gabrielle’s necklaces or other pieces, you understand that she understands drawing and sculpture.”
Her necklaces, bracelets, rings and earrings feature realistically wrought fauna — the fables’ foxes, monkeys, crows, cats and so on. “I started with a cat because I have a cat, but I’m not this crazy animal-loving person and I don’t want to make cute animals,” she said. “In the fables, they’re really characters.”
She noted that she actually prefers to study animals from life, during visits to forests and to the zoo in Paris. “I enjoy their attitude and movement,” she said.
Ms. Greiss sells her pieces through Joya and Matter and Shape, the design fair scheduled March 7 in Paris, as well as at Mameg, a boutique in Beverly Hills, Calif.
She has been making five sets of each of her designs, displaying and selling the first iterations in shadow boxes. The frames are made in New York by Thomas Engelhart, an artist who was one of her colleagues at Martine Sitbon, and covered in paper he had marbled by hand. Inside the boxes, the jewelry is hung from ornate ceramic fixtures that she fabricated at her home in Normandy, where she keeps a kiln. “They’re like little theaters,” she said. (And reflect her opinion that “you don’t always have to wear jewelry.”)
To display one-off pieces, Ms. Greiss has built ceramic stands using black clay and lustrous glazes, and placed them on painted wood plinths under Victorian cloches. “I like the wobbly glass,” she said, referring to how glass distorts over time.
Her necklace called the Fox and the Stork (€5,000, but €10,000 for the first one) and a pair of cuffs called the Snake and the File were purchased by Beth Rudin DeWoody, a collector who owns and operates the Bunker Artspace, an exhibition facility in West Palm Beach, Fla.
“I always felt that there was a thin line between fashion and art and jewelry and art,” Ms. DeWoody wrote in an email. “I own a lot of jewelry by artists and Gabrielle continues that tradition.” She said she plans to exhibit the jewelry at a Bunker show.
In her atelier, Ms. Greiss waved at a large felt board covered with drawings of animals, late-stage jewelry designs and conceptual collages. “Collaging helps me find the places for the gems,” she said. She carves her pieces in wax and then works with a Paris atelier to cast, polish and mount them.
Now she is interested in making jewelry with carved stones, and combinations of stones and wood elements. But Ms. Greiss said she intended to keep working on fable-inspired pieces, musing about two of the tales she already had depicted: a dove leaves its mate “to see the world and comes back a wreck, like, ‘It wasn’t great’”; and some animals pick a vain and foolish monkey as their new king.
“The fables will always be relevant,” she said.
The post Fables Inspire This French Jewelry Maker appeared first on New York Times.
