Between a rock and a hard place
JEWELLERY: NOMAD HÉLÈNE GETS INTIMATE WITH STONES, MEMENTOS AND PRECIOUS METALS
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she’s on a precious journey. Marie-Lais Emond
My Yol journey criss-crosses this continent, with forays to the Amazon River, the south-west of France, the southeast of China and to Turkey.
I travel from one room to the other, progressing from cabinets of Mauritanian finds in precious metal to counters decked with glowing Madagascanness, via table tops of Cote d’Ivoire objects set in gold, skirting Mali hung on the walls, observing what was and is now and hearing their stories of discovery from Hélène Thomas. It is an eventful trip.
I do sometimes wonder anyway about the word “jewellery” and if jewels have to be in it. Bijou in Hélène’s own tongue is closer to what she creates around. These items are precious for reasons of place and need not all be classified gems.
The metals are precious enough, as are some of the stones but they could equally be old keys, curved shells or driftwood, various beads or bone. To become a jeweller, Hélène studied, worked and became adept in all the metals, especially gold and silver.
To become a wanderer or a nomad as she says, picking up mementos on beaches and in markets, Hélène grew up in Africa and then continued to live in many of our continent’s countries, now South Africa. She sells here and at the Galerie Objet Rare in Paris.
“This neckpiece has molten eighteenth-century glass trade beads from Africa that originated in Venice.” They are set among semi-precious and other stones, with keys, in Tuareg silver.
Hélène’s workshop studio is at the end of the gallery or shop, where she sits behind a leather lap-cover, this on the loveliest corner of the Victoria Yards complex in Lorentzville, Johannesburg. Her enterprise is called Yol, Turkish for ‘the road’. Helen has an offshoot jewellery line called Yeu de Yol, where the finds are from the holiday shores of Ile d’ Yeu, off the French coast.
Every Yol piece tells its story or takes us to places we may or may not have been and it may travel on, borne by the wearer.
My favourite features a smallish palm nut from the Amazon. It has a face with Martian eyes of magical and opalescent prehnite gemstones, strung on a largelink silver chain with wood inclusions and a wondrous clasp. I notice a second face underneath and Hélène is delighted. I need to invite them into my life to know more intimately their precious journey.
7G Victoria Yards; yol-jewelry.com
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