No one makes jewellery like Silvia Furmanovich. That might sound like exaggeration. But the Brazilian designer is essentially an artist whose pieces happen to include metals and gems. And because she rarely works alone, preferring to bring together craftsmen from around the world, each piece feels totally unique. One year she might make a hand-painted scarab-beetle ring inspired by ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the next she might amalgamate fine Japanese bamboo into a gold bracelet. For her latest collaboration she has combined fine slivers of coloured wood from her homeland with silver finishes by Asprey.
In London last month for the Asprey launch, the jeweller admitted that, of all her collaborations — which have included making pieces for the Met and Bergdorf Goodman in New York and the new Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo — this one has particularly touched her. That’s because the woodworker with whom she collaborates, Maqueson da Silva, is from a tribe in northwestern Brazil that until recently had rarely ventured outside the Amazon. Discovered by a German missionary, he was persuaded to go to Germany to master marquetry. When he returned four years later he set up a studio to pass his skill on to others and today he employs 25 men and women, each of whom specialises in one aspect of the craft.
The workshop, Furmanovich says, has transformed the community in which da Silva lives. “Those people were very poor when I arrived ten years ago. Today, their lives have changed for the better. They can feed their families — even during the pandemic I kept them busy.”
Other than making medal boxes for the Brazilian military and trinket boxes for museum shops, da Silva now works almost exclusively for Furmanovich, creating jewellery and, for this Asprey project, boxes, frames and small trays adorned with butterflies, birds and flora from the Amazon, which silversmiths in London then finish. Each piece, the jeweller insists, is made using only fallen wood and bark collected from the forest floor or leftovers from the furniture industry that would otherwise have been discarded.
Because the wood is so thin and light it’s ideal for jewellery; none of it is chemically dyed. Each type of wood they use has its own colour — muirapiranga (red), tatajuba (yellow), louro abacate (green) and roxinho (purple) — and is washed with minerals to enhance the tones.
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Some trees are so rare and so precious, Furmanovich says, that da Silva has a safe room that is “full of incredible rolls of fine, fine veneers of the most beautiful wood”. Each piece is certified; Brazil, she adds, “is now very strict about tree crime — and for all the news about the burning and Amazonia, there is a lot of serious work done by the government in the area of Acre, where we work. The state and the army are inside the forest, and there are drones all over.”
At the launch, John Rigas, the chairman of Asprey, said that da Silva and his team’s craftsmanship was a perfect fit with their own. “They have mastered the art of wood marquetry to such a degree of refinement that it exceeds the skill of their German teachers,” he says. “The concept of reclaiming fallen wood from the Amazon forest to create such beautiful surfaces is among the rarest forms of artistic expression.”
That the British brand holds a royal warrant isn’t lost on the Brazilian woodsmen either, Furmanovich says. “It’s a first for Brazil, so all of us are really, really proud.”
Giants of the Amazon pieces range from £750 to £15,000; asprey.com, silviafurmanovich.com
