Spicing Things Up

In the hands of Cindy Chao, two hefty emeralds grew into a pair of exquisite brooches inspired by the humble cardamom pod

WORDS: ANNABEL DAVIDSON

Most people have at least some vague knowledge of the Indian spice cardamom – it’s what gives flavour to a chai latte or spices up basmati rice. You may even have a little jar of dried pods in your spice rack, quite drab and unassuming. Fresh cardamom, however, when still on the stalk, takes the form of shiny, bright green berries, far juicier looking than you’d expect.

It’s understandable, then, that the Taiwanese jeweller Cindy Chao took the humble spice as her inspiration for two huge Black Label Masterpieces – one-of-a-kind pieces that it takes all the savoir-faire, ingenuity and artistry at her disposal to bring to life.

The granddaughter of a renowned architect, Chao launched her label The Art Jewel in 2004, producing just a handful of pieces per year at prices that run into six figures. She has been appointed a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and has pieces in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

Three years ago, Chao was sitting on a pair of astonishingly large cabochon emeralds of 81 carats each (imagine a gobstopper sliced in half), but hadn’t yet conceived what to do with them when she happened upon cardamom while looking through a book of botanical drawings.

“I was looking for ideas,” she says, perched on a sofa in a suite of the grand Hôtel de la Marine during January’s Paris Haute Couture week. “Not inspiration – because inspiration comes to you – but ideas, when I saw a drawing of cardamom pods.”

Originally thinking she might make a pair of earrings (“but who can handle 81 carats of emerald in each ear?”), then that she might put both emeralds in one pod, she eventually settled on two similar but distinct brooches.

“I decided not to put the emeralds together, because you really need something to contrast them with. So I decided on pairing each of them with a sort of false pod, but made from rose-cut diamonds set in titanium to give each emerald something soft to contrast with.”

That something soft is more like a glowing diamond husk than anything solid – like the delicate skeleton left behind by autumn leaves. It serves not only to highlight just how plump the emeralds are, but also to contrast with their substance and heft.

The brooches, trembling in their glass vitrine, really have to be seen if the sheer scale of them is to be appreciated. Chao is delighted by how astonished people are at their actual size – each a good three inches long, two wide, and as deep as an inch at certain points.

“Pictures are two-dimensional so it’s very hard for people to visualise a work from an image alone,” she says. In reality, it’s not only the size that needs to be seen to be believed, it’s the 360-degree view of each brooch from all angles.

“You know, people say the ultimate art form is actually engineering,” Chao says. “Being able to do very precise calculations and build on them to get the final 3-D result.”

And the brooches – like all of her works, particularly her Black Label Masterpieces – are indeed like small architectural feats. Each piece has several layers of exhaustively detailed titanium framing, set with hundreds upon hundreds of yellow and brown diamonds, leaf-green tsavorites, lime-green demantoids, green sapphires and alexandrites.

Contrasting with the deep green of the giant cabochon emeralds –which themselves contain ‘gardens’ of tone and shade – and the bright white of the rose-cut diamonds, these gemstones give the brooches a truly organic, living feel, as verdant hues flow into more autumnal yellows, touches of purple and blue provide depth and contrast, and varying shades of titanium act as a canvas to let the whole riot of materials sing.

But how on earth, without sketching a design, does Chao translate what’s in her mind’s eye in a way that an entire team of casters, stone cutters, setters and polishers can understand it? She carves it from wax.

Lost wax casting isn’t unique to Chao – the method of carving or moulding wax before letting metal fill the void it leaves in a mould when melted has been used all over the world for thousands of years. But it is the only method Chao uses to bring her visions to life. In fact, the wax model that she carved for each brooch is a masterpiece in its own right, a giant seed pod in green, translucent in the places where the wax is thinnest, dark in others to represent the mass of the cabochon, the pod itself unfurling and twisting to reveal its depths.

“It took me about a year and a half to do the wax sculpting,” Chao admits, “because I change things about a thousand times. I don’t have a specific image in mind when I’m sculpting, it just grows from the wax as I go. And then we get it into manufacturing.”

That’s a hard-sounding word for a process so delicate and painstaking. In reality, the precious wax carvings, with all their minute detail – including spaces for every single one of those stones – are sent to Chao’s atelier in Geneva, where master craft workers cast them in titanium.

“The Swiss are the best for titanium because they’ve been working with it for such a long time – they started using it in watches first, so they’re very familiar with the material,” explains Chao, ever the perfectionist.

The stones are set one by one, before the various layers are intricately pieced together. “Pre-Covid, I was able to travel to Geneva and be there throughout the whole process,” Chao tells me. “It’s such a relief to be able to see it all happen again.”

The final piece of the puzzle is anodising the titanium to obtain the right shade. What is essentially an electrical process that changes the surface colour of the metal is rapid and delicate – a second more of the current can have unwanted results. “You can reverse it, but it’s very difficult,” Chao says.

Considering all this, plus the sourcing and recutting of stones, the polishing and setting of every single tiny diamond or garnet, not to mention the wax carving and casting, anodising and finessing, and it’s no wonder that Chao never simply sketches her ideas then has them brought to life.

These masterpieces are small buildings, involving architecture, engineering, calibrating and decorating. They’re the result of thousands of hours of work to bring Chao’s idea to fruition, and all starting with a loose pair of glowing green gemstones and a flick through a book of botanical drawings.

When we meet in Paris, one of the brooches has already been sold to a collector. “A client has purchased it, and I asked him if he was going to gift it to his wife,” Chao tells me. “He said no, he bought it for himself, maybe not even to wear, just to enjoy.”

Let’s hope he has the good sense to install it in a vitrine, expertly lit from all sides, and in the centre of the room. This is one jewel that requires 360-degree viewing.