|
style
jewelry | “WE’RE STARTING TO SEE A SIGNIFICANT SHIFT IN CONSCIOUSNESS. PEOPLE ARE JUST STARTING TO BECOME AWARE OF THE IMPACT OF THE METAL THEY BUY.” —GENEVIEVE ENNIS,
Written by JENNIFER MCCULLUM
“PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT CONFLICT DIAMONDS. WE CAN CREDIT LEONARDO DICAPRIO [and his 2006 film Blood
Diamond] for that,” says Genevieve Ennis, co-founder of Vancouver-based fine-jewelry studio Hume Atelier. “But that awareness hasn’t translated to metals.” Ennis and her partner, goldsmith and gemologist Kevin Hume, are on a mission to pull the curtain back on the often-shrouded origins of fine jewelry and make ethical sourcing an industry-wide priority. Since founding Hume Atelier in 2008, Ennis and Hume have advocated for ethical mining and fair trade. They’ve walked their talk, too, eliminating conflict materials from their bespoke jewelry designs and collaborating with governmental and intergovernmental agencies to aid artisanal and small-scale miners. The challenge is to maintain transparency at each stage of the supply chain, says Ennis. To that end, the duo travels around the world to meet with artisanal miners and processors, gathering information about local industry and developing solutions on both the micro and macro level. In 2009, they worked in Ecuador with the UN Industrial Development
46
graymag . com
Hume Atelier founders Kevin Hume and Genevieve Ennis craft ethical jewelry using Fairmined-certified gold and diamonds grown in a lab or sourced from Canada.
Organization to help inform benchmarks for fair-trade gold accreditation. In 2015, they spent a month in Côte d’Ivoire, helping USAID design a traceable and transparent diamond supply chain centered on miner land rights. As Hume Atelier helps to shape ethical standards for the jewelry industry, it’s also diving into cutting-edge technology. Since 2015, Ennis has conducted research at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on the relationships among mineral extraction, conflict, and territory, as well as exploring material and fabrication technologies at MIT’s Media Lab and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. “Goldsmithing is a very old-school, beautiful craft,” she says, “but we want to update it and integrate it with new technologies.” (Soft robotics applications for jewelry making are her latest fixation.) Ennis’s technical pursuits square neatly with her studio’s efforts in the policy arena. As she explains, “Education is an important part of our process. By aligning ourselves with initiatives that seek to make systemic changes, we can help make things better.” h
COURTESY GLASFURD & WALKER
GOLD STANDARDS
COFOUNDER, HUME ATELIER