What is your Creative Discipline?
Fine jewellery. Though I view it as language rather than product. Each piece is a study in philosophy, like the architecture of meaning, made material through design. I work from the conviction that an object shaped with enough intent can hold something written language alone cannot reach. The discipline sits at the point where sculpture, philosophy, and the wearer's own biography meet.
What role does intuition play in your approach?
It is entirely finished by intuition. I design from philosophy and themes of time that I keep returning to, but a piece comes to fruition from somewhere much more innate and intuitive. I think in abstract shapes and connections, and translate complex themes into curves, negative space, and texture beyond what seems to make sense, until it does.
A common myth about your industry?
Less a myth than something I am personally working against: That jewellery is a means to an end, or a flattened object standing in for a moment. Jewellery is one of the oldest institutions of humanity, it did not come from culture, but what gave rise to it.
Are there particular places, histories, or cultural threads you find yourself returning to?
The long history of adornment itself. I return often to the idea that the earliest surviving pieces of jewellery are older than the earliest surviving writing, and that the impulse to shape material into meaning predates almost every other thing we call civilisation. That is what sits under everything I design.
Architecture is the other thread, particularly Zaha Hadid, whose designs feel like form caught mid-motion, and structure that refuses stillness, the way a shape can hold tension without ever resolving it. There is something in the refusal to be contained that I love - the way an object can be outlined by everything around it, tracing what is left often reveals the true shape one may have been looking for in the first place.
Finally, my own history. When someone asks if my culture influences my work, I say absolutely, but not in the way one might think. I was born in Baghdad, with early years in Kuala Lumpur, before growing up in Auckland. I have a strong foundational plurality that gives me a deep appreciation for contrasts, fluidity, identity itself, and a refusal to fit into any category.
A life lived like the multiverse is what I orient toward.
What has been a particularly memorable encounter/environment?
Nothing in isolation seems to hold the meaning I reach for, and some of what I find most meaningful sits outside what anyone would even consider a moment. My life seems to speak in transience and accumulation.
Least favourite interior trend?
Besides the obvious, I definitely stay away from coastal interiors - half painted wood and a vibe that says nothing? No thank you.
Artwork to match the curtains, or the person?
To the person. A house is transient, you are forever. And a home interior tends to reflect the person anyway, or if it does not, the contrast between the art and home is its own kind of interesting.
A must read?
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
A must listen?
‘ How to Listen to This Album ‘ by Stereoclip.
Or in contrast:
‘ Criminal Romance ’ by Burr Oak …Surprise! I DJ heavy bass music in my spare time. I am nothing if not a series of contradictions.
Favourite place to dine?
Rata - Queenstown
If you could undertake any project, without limits, what would you pursue?
Even if I had unlimited funds in my account, I would still pursue jewellery design. I would simply use all my time to bring to life abstractions and thoughts that mean something only to me.
One thing you can’t work without?
Controlled periods of solitude. I am a very collaborative creator and I love to speak something into existence, but the work begins in a place I can only reach alone, and if I do not have real space around me, nothing arrives.
Advice you’d give to your younger self?
Don’t change a thing, you are exactly where you need to be and everything is leading you here.
You can invite any three individuals to dinner, who do you invite?
My grandmother, Zaha Hadid, and Marcus Aurelius. One from my own history, from the world I design in, one from the long conversation about how to live.
A hero?
My parents. Since I was young, they have made me believe I could do anything, and nothing I came to them with was ever met as impossible.
If you could live with any artwork of your choosing, which would it be?
The work I am drawn to suggests something just beyond what can be named, and reads as a love letter to the experience of being human, even where that experience is uncomfortable or unusual. Living with a single piece would mean choosing one edge of that. I would rather live surrounded by many.