Golden touch

Instinctive and unadorned, Fay Andrada’s pieces echo her unorthodox route into jewellery design

- Caragh Mckay

The hand-hammered finishes, off-kilter geometry and faintly primordial feel of Fay Andrada’s jewellery contradict her early career as a graphic designer. There’s no linear perfection nor strict adherence to scale in her huge disc earrings, tubular gold studs or domed silver cuffs. Rather, the handwork and deliberate lack of precision that mark out the work of the Brooklyn-based designer point to the more organic talents of a craftsman or skilled metalworker.

Andrada began her ‘totally unplanned’ creative realignment while working in advertising during the recession of the late 2000s. Jobs became scarce and she signed up for a class in metal jewellery design. At first, it was as a distraction. But Andrada also fancied that she could make pieces she had not discovered elsewhere. ‘I hadn’t responded to jewellery in a personal way before I started making it, because I found it so fussy,’ she says. ‘So much of cerebral jewellery lacks functionality – it’s not sexy. I thought it was more chic to wear a single piece of metal.’