Every piece of jewellery made by Bibi van der Velden begins with a sculpture. Here’s one she’s prepared earlier, a soft tendril of a flame cast in stone, sitting on a plinth in a hotel room at the Château Voltaire in Paris. If a sculpture could make sound, this one would whisper. This sculpture was the jumping off point for van der Velden’s 2021 collection, Smoke, which used quartz, opal and diamonds to represent the ephemeral waft of a smoulder. There’s a pair of earrings, for instance, that showcases a network of invisibly connected diamonds; the idea was to display impermanence, she says.

She dreamed up the collection during COVID, “when I was lighting candles all the time. They became a symbol of the pandemic for me”. Starting with a sculpture helps to define the collection in her mind. “The sculpture helps me get my head around the shapes. I’m a total 3D thinker.”