‘Nature as imagined’
Flowen Specimen pieces form sparkling, otherwordly fossils
At first blush, the fossil laboratory at the George C. Page Museum might seem like a strange place to introduce a new fine jewelry line, but after seeing the fossil-like earrings, scarab-beetle clutches and shell-like webbed rings that make up the new Flowen Specimens collection, it’s hard to think of a more appropriate place in the entire city than a mammoth bone’s toss away from the bubbling fossil repository known as the La Brea Tar Pits.
A collaborative effort from the L.A.-based wife and husband team of Flavia Lowenstein and Juan Azulay, Flowen’s earrings, pendant necklaces, clutch purses and rings are impossibly detailed, delicate looking webs of metal that all at once seem half biological, half geological and all otherworldly, like prehistoric sponges or insects frozen for eternity in amber.
“I’m an accessories designer,” Lowenstein said. “But I really wanted to create something meaningful and different — statement pieces. My mother worked in an art gallery so I’ve always been very much inspired by art and sculpture, and my husband is ex-faculty [at Southern California Institute of Architecture], trained as an architect and also a media artist, so we’re passionate about trying to push the envelope....”
The designs introduced at the Page Museum event are reminiscent of something Alexander McQueen, Iris van Herpen or an- other avant-garde fashion designer might do. Thin webs and loops of metal seem to grow around diamonds like metal fingers of coral, turn in on themselves to form intricate rings of doublewalled latticework or sprout like a pair of primeval brass knuckles from the mouth of a leather clutch.
The couple spent three years working on turning their sketches first into 2-D computer models and then into durable 3-D pieces. “It’s not 3-D printing, and it’s not casting,” Lowenstein said. “The pieces are grown from a sterling silver powder.” (Neither Lowenstein nor her husband wanted to discuss the process in more detail for fear of giving away proprietary information, saying only that the computer end of the work is done in the U.S. and the jewelry is “grown” in Italy.)
Azulay described the pieces as fossilized remains from a kind of alternative past. “The theme is ‘nature as imagined,’ ” he said, which means asking: “What would the natural world look like through these artifacts if it had [evolved] this way instead of that way. … These pieces belong in a world where a lot of things have been taken out of it, and [all that’s left is] nature at its most extreme.”
Most of the pieces in the Specimens collection are silver plated with either gold or a rubberized coating called “gommato” (the only exceptions are the clasps on the leather clutches, which are gold-plated brass). Retail prices start around $400 and top out around $18,000 for some heavily diamond-encrusted pieces.
Flowen’s Specimens collection can be purchased locally at Church boutique in West Hollywood.