Be my stabilopod barrier
While preparing my first full body of jewellery work under Magnuss, I found myself returning — almost instinctively — to a form that had shaped my early visual memory long before I ever studied sculpture or object design. The stabilopod.
These massive, angular concrete structures lining the Romanian Black Sea shore had always held a strange emotional weight for me. As a child, I would stand at a distance, mesmerised by their scale and silence. I wasn’t allowed to climb them — they were seen as dangerous — but that prohibition only deepened their symbolism. Over time, they became silent witnesses in my imagination: fractured guardians, standing firm against chaos. Now, years later, I approach them not as forbidden structures, but as symbols of emotional architecture.
“Be My Stabilopod Barrier” is both a conceptual jewellery collection and an artistic homage to those forms. Inspired by the Romanian invention developed around the early 2000s — engineer Mircea Ulubeanu, PhD engineer Mircea Lateș, researchers from ISCH Bucharest and draftmen from IPTANA* — the stabilopods were designed to absorb and dissipate the sea’s destructive force. Their raw geometry, built from purpose rather than ornament, feels to me like a metaphor for the ways in which we carry — and craft — our own forms of protection.
The collection consists of silver pieces shaped through hand-sculpting and metalwork — a necklace made of 25 stabilopod fragments, earrings, a bracelet, and a pendant. None of the forms are repeated. Many are broken. Like the original structures damaged by decades of sea and wind, their fractured edges speak of persistence, not perfection.
At the base of each piece, I’ve applied a patina — a wash of green-blue, subtle but deliberate — to evoke the idea that these forms have emerged from water, or perhaps never fully left it. This chromatic trace becomes a residue of memory, a quiet surface tension between wear and story.