The photograph showed Cristina’s sister on a boat, the Shanghai skyline behind her. For Cristina, the maker behind Crisattelier, the part worth keeping was how her sister looked in that moment.
“When I looked at the photo, I noticed how happy and carefree she looked, standing on a boat with the Shanghai skyline behind her,” she wrote in an email interview. “I wanted to capture more than just the place; I wanted to preserve the feeling of that moment.”
She made a silver ring with the skyline, she said, so her sister could carry that reminder into an ordinary working day as a nurse. The photograph supplied a shape, but the reason for making the ring came from the person in it.
“For me, this is what jewellery can do,” Cristina wrote. “It can become a small, tangible reminder of a moment we never want to lose.”
That gives the design a practical problem: how much of a memory can a small object hold? Cristina starts by asking what the person wants to keep close, rather than applying the same design to every story.
“Every story is different, so I don’t follow a fixed formula,” she wrote. “I start by trying to understand what makes the memory special and what the person wants to keep close.”
A photograph may supply recognizable details; another piece may begin with a place or a feeling. Cristina said she usually works in sterling silver and also incorporates natural materials, including sea glass she finds along the coast.
“Each material has its own character, and I try to let it guide the design rather than forcing it into a predetermined shape,” she wrote.
The material and the memory both set limits. Keeping every detail isn’t the aim.
“The challenge is to simplify a story without losing what makes it meaningful,” Cristina wrote. “I want the finished piece to be beautiful, but above all, I want the person to recognise their own story in it.”
Recognition doesn’t mean the maker gets to know the whole story afterward. Asked whether a wearer had given a piece an unexpected meaning, Cristina described the privacy that remains between an object and its owner.
“I may know the story that inspired the design, but I can never know everything the finished piece will represent in someone else’s life,” she wrote.
The Shanghai ring began with something Cristina saw in a photograph. What her sister keeps finding in it belongs to her.
“And perhaps that is the real magic of jewellery: the maker creates the piece, but the person who wears it gives it a life and a meaning of its own,” Cristina wrote.