Andrew Geoghegan - The Path to Jewellery Design

Andrew Geoghegan designs really unique jewellery. They’re striking pieces that definitely make a statement. But it wasn’t always jewellery that he was focused on! Laings had the opportunity to find out more about Andrew and how he became the celebrated jeweller that we know today…

1 – Tell us a little about your journey to becoming a jewellery designer?

“As a child I was really creative, so I was always found drawing or painting or perhaps hidden in my Dads garage making something. I knew at an early age that was the path I wanted to take, to be creative, and to be an artist of some description. Then at school for some reason they let me near anvils, hammers and fire so I found myself creating sculptures and I loved it. What I loved about it was the fact I could do anything with this metal that I wanted to, I could drill it, I could melt it, I could bend it and fold it. I think perhaps, as a little bit of a control freak, in essence I’ve got this metal and I could do exactly what I wanted with it. After school I went to college and focused on jewellery design and on tableware, but always with this focus on metalwork. At university I was introduced to stone-setting, a combination of gems and metal. To me that was incredible, first of all my inquisitive mind wanted to know how do you set those stones to the metal, what’s the technique and how’s it done. I started to learn techniques for stone setting and really started a journey into jewellery that was about the relationship between stone and metal and how I could explore that and express that.”

2 – Did your experience in sculpting and metal work influence your jewellery designs?

“Massively. I don’t believe I have a traditional approach to jewellery design. I don’t see it as, if it's a ring, there’s the setting, there’s the shank,
there’s the stone. For me it’s more like, perhaps we have a stone, there’s the finger, now how are we going to manipulate metal around the stone and around the finger to be functional, which it has to be, but also to be artistic, to be beautiful, to be practical. In a way it’s an artistic brief, but also an engineering brief as well, a combination of the two. The sculptural background definitely influences the way I design and I do see what I do as more about works of art than functional jewellery, but it is both.”

3 – What skills and knowledge did you transfer from sculpture to jewellery design?

“Well, learning to work metal, learning the characteristics of it. Things like learning to heat it up, to manipulate it and to see how far I can push it. This is what I learnt in sculpture, and yes it’s a different metal to gold platinum and silver, but there are cross-overs there. I love the permanence of metal, so when I tried ceramics I wasn’t so keen, because it was a little bit messy and a little bit soft. With the metal, when I moved it it stayed in that position, so I felt like I was really working and pushing this form.”

4 – What ultimately made you decide to focus on jewellery?

“You know maybe it happened before I started studying. I have this memory of sneaking into my Mum and Dads bedroom, maybe 5 years old, and I saw this ornate jewellery box, a trinket box on top of the dresser. I wasn’t allowed in my Mum and Dads bedroom so there was this excitement to it. I sneaked over to this trinket box and opened it and I remember these snaking chains and other non-descript jewellery. Then I saw this beautiful orange stone on a cocktail ring. I remember it distinctly, it was a large, emerald cut citrine. I remember pulling it out and being quite intrigued by it. That perhaps was the moment that my future path was set in a way. That moment of going ‘wow, look at this treasure, how have they done that, what is it?’ Maybe that was the moment I was like, it’s jewellery!"

Stay tuned for the next instalment of out interview where we’ll chat about inspiration with Andrew Geoghegan!

Thank you for taking the time to check out our interview with Andrew Geoghegan! Follow our latest news on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, or if you have any questions please pop us an email at [email protected].

Til next time, Laings xXx