Warm congratulations to Alma Leon, a Department of Jewelry Design graduate, who is one of the winners at Arts Thread magazine’s Global Design Graduate Show, held in collaboration with Gucci! Leon is the only Israeli winner in the competition’s craft category, where she was chosen from among dozens of candidates from all over the world.

Leon’s submission to the competition was her graduate project, “Across The Land”. The project puts forth the claim that material culture is essential to our survival and says something about us as a society, just as jewelry is a characteristic of identity. Looking for a responsible material alternative, Alma Leon wandered the length and breadth of Israel, researching materials that were simple, local, and available.

Alma Leon (Photo: Daniel Sheriff)

As part of her research, she returned to “primitive” strategies and manipulations such as multiplying, manual labor, drying, kneading, and casting. The five necklaces she created are frail and ephemeral; in this they mimic the country, with its political volatility and unstable borders. They tell the story of their own creation and also the story of the place in which we live and our identity within it.

At the top of the page: photo by Alma Leon