Rhea Simone Henry
BA (Hons) Product Design and Craft
“You hear it before you see it”
Rhea Simone Henry is a British jeweler of Jamaican and English descent from Manchester. She works with a variety of different metals like brass, copper and precious metals like silver. Her work is a merge of inspirations and experiences she has encountered along her travels from around the world. One thing she loves to take back home from her travel trips that reminds her of experiences is adornments, as its so far different from the western world. She takes inspiration from a variety of different cultures but mainly from different tribes in Africa, India and Asia. From these country's she has built up a profound love for ritualistic adornments.
She merges different traditions and finds a place and identify within her work, finding the balance to enable it to fit into our society with a innovated an contemporary twist. Rhea’s work seeks to encapsulate the beauty of merging different society's and cultures in the hope to celebrate and appreciate the difference between people from other backgrounds. She follows a lot of traditional methods to create her adornment pieces, like that of repousse and fabric imprinting which you will find are the techniques familiar amongst many of her pieces. Finding the balance between the weight and size for the adornments is key to her pieces being a success or not. It’s important for the adornments to be much larger then body part that’s adorning it. The statement pieces of adornment she creates make you feel empowered just like that of the women that wear them in in the tribes they are inspired by. Each piece is handmade, with no two pieces ever being same as the last.
