Stitch

A brooch hangs against a pale field, its surface catching light like a thin film on water. A cool, glassy colour pools inside metal rims, while adjacent sections swell and buckle, as if a current has been arrested mid-turn. Edges look crisp, then soften into pitted textures, the way ice gives way to melt. The work seems to breathe between shine and scar. The dialectic is immediate: this is not permanence or change, but permanence and change mutually generating each other. From afar, the forms settle into a quiet, rounded silhouette; up close, tool marks, enamel granules, and seams reveal a disciplined struggle. In that shift, metal becomes the narrator, and he argues that FLOW can hold instability without surrendering weight.

Material becomes the first evidence. Chen, based between London and Birmingham today, works with metal through enamelling, chasing, repoussé, raising, and hollow-forming, pushing a traditionally “fixed” medium into states that feel liquid, frozen, eroded, and mineralised. Form follows behaviour: surfaces ripple, crust, and glaze, translating water’s rhythms into wearable architectures rather than illustrations. Viewer experience is choreographed by scale and proximity—the body must tilt to read reflections, then step back as glare flattens detail intothe atmosphere. The core tension tightens: control is not opposed to surrender here; it is built through the labour of making.

Method, in FLOW, begins with observation and research that is both cultural and phenomenological, asking how human and non-human bodies adapt under external change. Water becomes a model not because it is “beautiful,” but because it rehearses survival—flowing around obstacles, freezing into armour, and returning. Chen’s pieces echo frozen waterfalls and travertine terraces, letting mineral logic appear as layered edges and condensed volumes. For the wearer, these objects behave like small weather systems: they cool the skin, catch ambient light, and carry the sensation of a moving world into stillness. The button returns: fragility and resilience are not two moods, but a single cycle.

FLOW ultimately frames jewellery as an intimate device for remembering nature in motion. By treating metal as a living medium—responsive, emotional, and continually forming—Chen shifts craft from display to dialogue, where an object does not merely decorate but asks for attention, patience, and care. What remains after the glance is not a metaphor but a physical lesson: change can be worn, and endurance can be tender, like a line of light skating along an enamelled edge.