About

I grew up in the presence of beautiful, storied things. My father was an antique jeweller, and his world shaped my eye before I had language for it: the worn lustre of Georgian gold, the organic strangeness of Art Nouveau, objects that had passed through many hands before reaching ours.

I came to making through a longer route. I studied cultural anthropology, drawn to questions about how objects carry meaning, how adornment functions as ritual, how the things we choose to wear on our bodies speak a private language about desire and identity. I wrote poetry alongside my studies. Both disciplines taught me the same thing: that form is never neutral, and that beauty, at its most interesting, is always doing something.

Goldsmithing felt like a homecoming. I trained in the craft and began working in Vancouver, where I now hand-sculpt each piece in my studio. My process is intuitive and slow. I work primarily in wax, building forms that echo the eroded, aqueous quality of things shaped by time and nature rather than precision machinery. Baroque ornament, the fluid lines of Art Nouveau, the bold abstractions of mid-century Modernism — these histories move through my hands without me trying to reproduce them.

The Delphine collection takes its name from Delphi, the ancient sanctuary of prophecy on the Aegean. It felt right for work that arrives through instinct more than calculation, pieces that seem like they might have been unearthed rather than made.

Alongside my original work, I collect and sell antique and vintage jewellery. These pieces are not separate from my practice. They are part of the same conversation. I am drawn to objects that carry a visible history, where beauty and imperfection are inseparable. All gemstones in my original work are repurposed from vintage sources.

Jewellery, to me, is a form of wearable sculpture and, more than that, a site of intimate ritual. The act of putting something on, of choosing what to carry on your body through a day, is a small and private act of self-expression that I find endlessly compelling.

Sarah Silvey works and lives in Vancouver, BC.