Nobuko Okumura

Nobuko Okumura has been working in fine jewellery in her own small business now for nearly two years.  With a degree in Jewellery and Silversmithing as well as awards from the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, she now works in precious metals, stones and minerals.   All of the work Nobuko sells, she designs and hand finishes herself at her home studio.

Nobuko’s work is influenced and inspired by a wide range of things.  Some being the contemporary jewellers she has worked with and alongside.  She also loves the “Arts and Craft” movement of last century and the more recent architecture of this century.  As well as this Nobuko’s particular passion has developed from her own perception of treasure and a playful understanding of the handheld object.  She remembers finding things in her home in Japan as she grew up that would be collected as “treasure”.  Precious to her only, things like one of the coloured tiles from her grandmother’s mosaic workshop, or a piece of broken pot found by the river.  Nobuko recalls owning a jointed wooden snake as a toy and this has directly influenced the “Vertebrae” collection she is currently showing.  Although precious stones and metals are used to make Nobuko’s pieces; she maintains a humble understanding that preciousness is not in the material but in the ownership of an item.  Treasure needs to be discovered and then it can be loved.

Nobuko always keeps a sense of weight, colour and scale about what she makes and likes to consider the person that might own each piece.  This will come into play more so with her commissions as she can sit with the person in question and find out really what is important to them.  What influenced the decision to get a commissioned piece of jewellery and what they might regard as being precious.

The Vertebrae Collection features a string of cubes and is made using a strip of square solid silver wire that is then cut by hand part way through with a saw at regular intervals down the length of the wire.  This is then shaped to make each piece.  Minerals are incorporated in some of these works.  The large stones are the not commercially precious but have, for Nobuko, the treasure quality of that discovered object.  This is an important emotion in owning jewellery and is one that Nobuko will continue to explore. 

Nobuko works from her home studio and is the Artist in Residence at the Birmingham School of Jewellery.  She has a number of stockists where she sells her jewellery as well as a website that she uses for an online portfolio.  Her next exhibition after the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair, will be in Centrepiece, a jewellery and Silversmithing showcase over December at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham.