Little gems

British jewellery and homeware brand Completedworks turns its reductionist vision to bags

- HANNAH SILVER

A preoccupation with the relationship between form and function meant a move into fashion accessories was perhaps inevitable for London-based jewellery and homeware brand Completedworks. For the past decade, its artistic director Anna Jewsbury has infused ceramics and jewellery with a sculptural sensibility, presenting everything from vases that appear to have been casually scrunched in the hand to offbeat, playfully proportioned earrings. Now, she turns her sharp eye to bags.

This fascination with exploring the limits of a material and bringing a malleability to seemingly resistant forms has always inspired Jewsbury. 'One of the things we've always done from the beginning with the jewellery, and also ceramics, has been exploring the movement of fabric and leather, looking at the way leather folds or crumples and knots, which is obviously something very often associated with bags,' she says. "There's always been a cross-pollination of ideas: behind the scenes, we like to have these ideas that we put aside because they were only relevant to products that we didn't offer. We then kept them for the right moment.'