Chin Teo
Melbourne based jeweller Chin Teo is the talented young craftsman who creates jewellery under his eponymous label. Scoute sat down with Teo to discuss his latest collection ‘Morning Light’, featuring a selection of hand-crafted pieces in silver and precious metals characterised by strong monumental shapes and natural textural finishes.
The Chin Teo story
After studying Industrial Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and graduating with honours in 2008, Teo’s lack of interest in the world of commercial design led him to study jewellery making and silversmithing. He quickly discovered crafting small, hand-made objects to be the right medium to explore his fascination with raw materials. While his creations can easily be associated with fashion and clothes of a particular aesthetic, Teo’s jewellery also has the ability to stand alone; it’s beauty lies simply in the materiality, form and textures of the object itself.
“Fashion and clothes actually came much later in my life,” Teo explains. “For me, it was when I stopped looking at clothes, and got my senses in touch with raw materials; the smell of leather, the touch of wool, the shininess of precious metal. I found my inner voice, the desire to be creative.” Using raw materials as a starting point allows him to explore the possibilities of the material on two fronts; form and texture. “Raw materials have different faces, the ability to be seen in different angles and also the potential to be altered and manipulated. As a designer, it’s important to place myself as a medium and translate these to the audience in my own design language. And that’s essentially what brings out my desire to create, to let others see what I see.”
Tradition and experimentation
Crafting jewellery is a laborious process that requires patience; a simple piece can take three hours to complete. “It varies with more complicated designs,” Teo says. “A couple of pieces in the new collection can take almost a whole day to make.” He takes pride in the fact that he personally crafts every piece that comes out of his studio in Melbourne. The tools he chooses to work with are traditional (although he confides an egg is used in part to achieve a particular finish). “Each piece is made from a piece of raw sterling silver, manually bent, shaped, formed, sanded, polished… into a finished piece of jewellery. Therefore each piece within the same style is unique in their own way. There are quite a few different finishing treatments I have been experimenting with, especially in this new collection. Many pieces come in multiple finishes to choose from (polished, heat oxidized, chemically oxidized, flooded and porcelain). They are the ‘faces’ I look to discover in the material. Each ages differently, but yet, eventually revealing themselves; they are all the same material. I find this reversion of aging pattern fascinating.”
This experimentation of form and texture results in jewellery with a surprisingly organic presence, but the process is not without challenges. “Unlike casting jewellery where I could create one piece and then reproduce it in almost 100% accuracy, recreating a piece each time exactly from start to finish from scratch means there is much higher chance I could stuff up the piece during the complicated process,” Teo candidly reveals. “It is a delicate balance of consistency and irregularity that I am constantly weighing to ensure I am 100% happy with every piece that goes out of my studio; it’s the part I struggle with the most. But I like that challenge, it’s a learning curve, and it’s old fashioned. If I stuff something up, I redo it again. There is no shortcut.”
Morning Light
If Teo’s first collection ‘Long Dream’ was an exploration of the surreal, his latest collection ‘Morning Light’ is an awakening to reality. Nascent ideas of shapes and textures explored in the former are now more tangibly elucidated, as well as introducing a new forms and faces. When asked about the inspiration behind the collection, he simply replies, “My work is very much influenced and derived from my own personal life and its surroundings. It’s a mixture of elements in life experiences rather than (inspiration from) a particular creation/artist that I come across. The object (jewellery) is abstract from its purest form (material); how it is perceived (seen), is not critical.”
As well as being represented at the leading Melbourne boutique Eastern Market, Teo also works with select clients one-on-one, crafting pieces to meet their individual needs. “Recently, a male client approached me with a silver pendant a friend had given him as a gift bought from an op shop,” Teo describes. “The pendant was a circular cross design with a light oxidized finish. He loved it, but couldn’t find the right chain to go with the pendant – he wanted something unique and masculine. So he commissioned me to create a one-off hand made chain. I wanted to make something quite texturized instead of plain circular or oval chain links. The initial idea was to plait three thin wires to form one body then make the chain links out of that. But it didn’t go the way I wanted and it was unsuccessful. Then the idea shifted; I decided to twist the thin wires this time, quite tightly but not tight enough to look like machine made. And it was a success. The chain consists of just over 100 twisted circular links, each individually soldered by hand, then later, chemically oxidized and lightly polished to match the pendant. The client now wears it everyday. This kind of relationship is what motivates and drives me to do better.”
Visit chinteo.com
Interviewed by Brian Chung
Photos courtesy of Chin Teo