Lorianna is a Kenya-born artist, jewellery maker, and designer whose work carries the imprint of a life lived between cultures, coastlines, and continents. Born and raised in Mombasa, Kenya and then later growing up between England and Mauritius, her perspective is rooted in culture and a deep belonging to nature. Two influences that touch everything she creates: the ocean and the African wilderness — their textures, their untameable wildness.
Her path into jewellery began with her mother's jewellery box. Her mother, who grew up in the Middle East, carried a distinctive sense of adornment that sparked an early fascination with jewellery as both object and expression. Her work begins in the wild, where African landscapes, ancestral craft traditions, and raw natural textures converge. She draws on romantic, evocative forms of adornment found across ancient and desert landscapes, reinterpreted through a modern, sculptural lens. At the core of her practice is an exploration of texture, imperfection, and material memory — the way surfaces hold time, and how organic forms exist within both landscape and crafted object. Her designs are shaped by this dialogue between instinct and environment, and by a lifelong connection to the ocean.
With a background in Fashion Journalism and Marketing, she focused her dissertation on jewellery's relationship to feminism and culture. Her experience in front of the lens shaped her understanding of the body in motion and the relationship between adornment, form, and presence. She developed her industry knowledge working in Patrick Mavros's flagship London store, before her fascination deepened into a self-taught practice and her own language within the craft.
Each piece begins as wax in Lorianna's studio. She carves every design by hand from a block of carving wax, cutting, filing, and shaping until the form feels right. This is the slowest part of the process, and the most important. The wax holds every decision and every inspiration — the weight of a band, the texture of a surface, the curve that catches light. If it exists in the final piece, she carved it. Once the wax is finished, it's cast using the lost-wax method, a technique that's thousands of years old. The wax is encased in a mould, then burned away, leaving a perfect negative. Molten metal is poured into that void. When the plaster is broken away, the piece emerges — a one-to-one translation of the wax, down to the smallest texture.Because the wax is destroyed in the process, every casting is a small act of commitment. The result is jewelry that carries the evidence of its making: textured, weighty, a little imperfect, and entirely handmade.
