ART: Crafting wearable art from found objects

Standing Out Magazine | NOVEMBER 2022

With a decade-and-a-half worth of experience in the design and art industry Stefni Muller has turned her back on conventional design and manufacturing processes and focusses on the inspiration that an array of different mediums bring. She challenges the value systems built on gold and diamonds by replacing them with temporary elements, found objects, alternative metals and each client’s story.

These are her words:

ON HER EVOLUTION AS A JEWELER AND ARTIST

Art has always been a part of my life. I thinkfrom a very early age I used it as a nervoussystem regulator. Since I was very little rightthrough to 38, which I am now. It’s held myhand for the majority of my life and it’s beenan incredible support system in a way. I used tobring my artworks back from kindergarten andtell my mom that she should keep them becausethey’re gonna be worth a lot one day. ‘After all,I’m gonna be a famous artist,’ I told her.

After school I went to Stellenbosch University to study jewelry design and manufacturing at. Initially wanted to study graphic design but –– to be truthfully honest –– I didn’t know what to study. I definitely wasn’t ready for the world. I wasn’t ready to face the world after school, but I knew I didn’t want to get a job after school right away. I was too scared by the thought of going out into the world and traveling and practicing my independence and the responsibility of independence, so the other option was to go study and I applied for graphic design and completed my degree.

However, after university, I decided I was never going to pick up a jewelry design tool again and gave up on art altogether. I felt that it wasn’t for me and took to the road and went to England. I worked in Tesco’s of all places and just wanted to do something completely mundane. For three years I followed the summer between SA and England and had many fantastic surf trips and saw amazing beautiful places.

When I came home in the summer of that third year art found me again. I bumped into a friend randomly and there happened to be a studio available. My tickets to go back to England were already booked and I kind of took the leap and said yes to the studio and put the deposit down. Being in England I just knew I had to go back to South Africa and make this happen.

So, for three years I didn’t paint, I didn’t draw, I didn’t write a single thing. A friend’s birthday came along, and I decided to make an artwork for him and basically, that’s how the ball started rolling again.

I was very excited to go back to Knysna to start my own studio and on my return from England, I had packed all my jewelry tools away, I didn’t even know where they were. I was having a celebratory coffee with my mom when a lady from a next-door shop came over to the coffee shop owner and said she had a problem as her opening was in 10 days and her jewelry designer had dropped her. She was asking the owner of the coffee shop to just make a post or a pamphlet or spread the word that she was looking, and there I was sitting.

My mom then blurted out: ‘Stefni makes jewelry’ and she asked me to get a few ranges together as samples. I went on to supply her for the next three seasons in Plettenberg Bay and that’s how the jewelry side of things got started up again.

With this push, I decided to get back into it fulltime. Then came the Design Indaba, Kamers Vol Geskenke and I supplied a few shops in Cape Town. Eventually, I moved to the Mother City and now work out of a small studio close to Cape Point.

ON THE CONCEPT OF ‘WEARABLE ART’

I’ve never really resonated with the term ‘jewelry.’ In my mind I’ve never been a jeweler, I’m more of an idea creator or an imagination picker: I take what is in the imagination and work from there.

Jewelry seems a term, too conventional to fit into what I do. It could be a rebellious act against anything conventional but ‘wearable art’ is a beautiful way of describing something that is created from a place and with mixed medium that can be put into a box or have a label, so it’s something that’s more art than jewelry. It happens to be wearable. I see my jewelry pieces as little artworks and whenever I can, I try to put fabric or text or colour in some form or shape in and like to includes some temporary element in there. I’m not so drawn to precious metals or semi-precious or precious gemstones. I love the idea of finding objects, alternative mixed metals or mediums, things that are often seen as the strangest things you can ever think about, and putting them in jewelry and I sometimes wish that I could just draw something and pick it off the paper and put it on. But metal works a little bit differently.

I think I resonate more with picking up a pencil and putting it down on paper, it took me a very long time to understand what metal does, I just didn’t resonate all that much with metal at university. But when I stepped into my studio and started to approach metal from a different perspective I realised that, although it’s this hard solid material that can be moody at times, it can also be soft – it is this beautiful malleable thing and what you can do with it is limitless.

CRAFTING WEARABLE ART FROM FOUND OBJECTS

I have partnered up with quite a few conservation organisations over the years, my favorite being The Beach Co-Op, they are a local conservation community, that started with beach cleanups all along the coast and I join them forever New Moon clean up in Muizenberg and we have an arrangement that all the stuff I collect, I bring back to the studio, make jewelry out of that and then we launch the little range and whenever the next little even it of theirs and it’s from the beach debris, it’s a beautiful way of closing the circle and upcycling. It’s amazing to see what we collected change into something that is adored and makes women feel beautiful.

ON TELLING STORIES THROUGH HER PIECES

If I can be brutally (and beautifully) honest, the truth is that through storytelling (or telling other people’s stories) through my work is so deeply linked with my own journey in life. The creative journey has been a deeply personal one. I want my jewellery to reflect it and I desire to share this experience with my clients. We all have a story within us, one worth sharing with the world and I want to be the one that tells it, visually through onceoff bespoke jewellery pieces.

ON THE SUSTAINABLE LIVING

Sustainability, for me, is thinking outside the box. In my personal opinion, we already have everything we need. It’s just the lack of imagination in a way that’s keeping us from ultimate success.

Conservation is something I’m extremely passionate about, my parents instilled in me a great sense of adventure. I would have loved to have gone into conservation, but I became a jeweler and I didn’t know what it would give me later on in life. But you know, I realise I am exactly where I am meant to be: Even having become a creative – a jeweler – my passion for conservation never left, and I realised this could give me a powerful voice in conservation too.

Art and conservation, somehow ‘marry’ very well. I think it’s the visuals, if you visually present someone with beautiful things and there’s a cause behind it, somehow they are more receptive to what you have to say. So even though I never became a conservationist, or am physically saving whales or rhinos, through my art, I can also contribute.

Website: www.stefni.co.za