Although a fully trained goldsmith who graduated from the Royal College of Art in London, Christopher Thompson Royds is an artist jeweller in the truest sense: an artist who choses jewellery as his medium.
His work is influenced by Victorian 'Natura Morta’ studies of plants. His earliest work included real cut and dried flowers, which left the wearer in a quandary: wear the work and the fowers would disintegrate; keep it forever in its box and they would remain. This approach developed into his present work in which each dried flower is traced in gold. The gold is painted to resemble the dried flower, and twisted together into truly wearable art.
"It's all about preserving an instant," says jeweller Christopher Thompson Royds, whose Natura Morta (Italian for "still life") collection immortalises everything from white clover to buttercups. Tracing around the stems and petals of pressed wild flowers (Kensal Rise cemetery in west London is apparently one of his hotspots), Thompson Royds hand cuts them in layers of paper thin gold or silver, binding them with fine gold wire. It's a process he compares to "tying up roses in the garden". Each piece is housed in a marbled folio box, an allusion to the Hans Sloane Herbarium at the Natural History Museum. (Aimee Farrell, 2016)
