Melanie Georgacopoulos, The Curious Jeweller

In the eyes of some high-jewellery experts, the creations of Melanie Georgacopoulos can be considered almost blasphemous. From drilling holes in pearls to dicing them or slicing them in two, the Greek-born, Hamburg-based jeweller has been taking a radical approach to traditional pearl jewellery, and in the process, surprising her clients with unexpected, sculptural forms.

“The first time I discovered Melanie’s work it literally gave me goose bumps,” says Valery Demure, founder of personal shopping concept Objet d’Emotion, recalling Georgacopoulos’s Arlequin necklace, which features two perfectly matched halves of two different coloured pearls to create a chequered effect. “To me she is the punk queen of pearls!” Demure says.

Georgacopoulos’s highly unusual approach to pearls developed out of curiosity. While working on her graduation project at the Royal College of Art she picked up a fine jewellery saw and cut a pearl in half. “I had no idea what it looked like inside and I was just interested in the material,” she recalls.

“Because I had previously studied sculpture, I was able to cut pearls and facet them confidently, I wasn’t really worried about the value, thinking ‘this is expensive, I can’t cut it.’ I think if I had come from a purely jewellery background I wouldn’t have been so fearless with my approach. But I’ve always looked at pearls as a material rather than a symbol of status.”

Yet the young jeweller was also clear she would only cut pearls when it “made sense” to do so aesthetically, i.e. incorporating the natural growth rings of a pearl into the overall design. “I don’t just want to cut pearls as a provocation. I want to actually design something that totally makes sense,” she explains.

“It’s really about playing around with the notion of what is a pearl. It’s still a pearl, but it’s also something else, and I really like to play with that ambiguity,” she says.

The reaction to her first collection (in 2007) was mixed, as Georgacopoulos recalls, “Some people loved it, but some people also didn’t like what I had done and told me, ‘you can’t do that to pearls.’” While she sold many pieces, she took a job as a designer for a jewellery brand.

Three years after her first collection, interest was still coming in so she decided to dive into the world of pearls on her own and launched her eponymous brand in 2010. Her work was quickly picked up by trendy concept stores Colette in Paris and Dover Street in London and the following year she was approached by Japanese high-end jeweller TASAKI. This resulted in the launch of a joint brand M/G TASAKI in 2012, combining her creative, irreverent flair for design with the Japanese jeweller’s renowned craftsmanship.

In the last couple of years, Georgacopoulos has been repositioning her own brand to focus more on mother of pearl, saying it is “a much overlooked material in contemporary jewellery and I feel about this material the same than I felt about pearls.”

She notes, “For me it’s a natural evolution, as it’s a by-product of pearl farming. But at the same time it’s an extremely different material because you get it mostly flat.”

Once again taking the less travelled road, Georgacopoulos has been using a marquetry technique — usually used to inlay mother of pearl — to create mini-sculptures from the material that look like diamond-cut gemstones.

“As my work evolved I realized I’m extremely interested in the value that you bring to a jewellery piece through the craftsmanship, rather than the material value of the stone. At the end of the day, it’s just a stone, and I’m more interested in how you can elevate a material that no one talks about or cares about, like mother of pearl.”

She adds, “To me it’s also taking on a more sustainable approach. If you cultivate pearls, why not also use the oyster for something else, not just grind it.”