Imma Gibert

Imma began study­ing the craft of jew­ellery in the mid-70s and for years taught at Barcelona's jew­ellery ex­change school. Her stu­dio is filled with tools, ma­chines and small ob­jects, each with a story. She has been taught by a num­ber of jew­ellers and crafts­peo­ple and quite often they have passed on tools.

“Sketch­ing and draw­ing help me con­cen­trate. I mostly work with sil­ver and cop­per, and also gold. Some­times I use other ma­te­ri­als but it de­pends on how I cre­ate the emo­tional link be­tween the ob­ject and the per­son who will wear it. There is a link: in­ti­mate, dis­creet and void of op­u­lence.”

She is par­tic­u­larly drawn to en­grav­ing and tries, wher­ever pos­si­ble, to merge the two tech­niques into a sin­gle artis­tic lan­guage. Some of her gems are spe­cial to her be­cause they allow her to bring to­gether two dif­fer­ent spe­cial­ties, such as en­grav­ing and gold­smithing. Oth­ers she likes be­cause they bring her closer to the pic­to­r­ial world. Be­tween 2004 and 2007, she took par in the R + D + I: MEC Pro­ject and FEDER, deal­ing with non-toxic and re­cy­clable ma­te­ri­als in the pro­duc­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion of art­works, under Rosa Vives, pro­fes­sor of paint­ing and print­mak­ing at the fine arts de­part­ment of Barcelona uni­ver­sity. The team stud­ied re­de­vel­op­ing the use of cop­per as the core metal in the pro­duc­tion of jew­ellery. The re­cy­cling process, aimed at open­ing a new artis­tic di­men­sion and ex­tend­ing the life of cop­per was a great suc­cess.

1 Jew­eller's ham­mer: more than 70 years old. It be­longed to the jew­eller Dani Huguet, who taught me a lot and passed it on when he re­tired.

2 Hy­draulic press: one of my favourites. It al­lows me to cre­ate vol­ume, and at the be­gin­ning I used it to make watch cas­ings.

3 Work in progress.

4 “Fish” brooch in sil­ver and cop­per: It is etched with acid.

4b “Fish” brooch.

5 Two rings, sil­ver and cop­per: made with fu­sion tech­nique that uses cut­tle­fish bone. It is an an­cient tech­nique used dur­ing Roman times.

6 Sil­ver bracelet: mod­elled out of wax and made in sil­ver using a micro-fu­sion tech­nique. The oval-shaped bracelet is made out of a sin­gle piece.

7-8 Sil­ver and cop­per bracelet and brooch: made of gold, sil­ver and bone.

9 Sil­ver and lapis lazuli brooch: nat­u­ral­is­tic style re­pro­duces a cherry tree leaf in the shape of a seed.

10 Brooch: it has a nat­ural style and is em­bossed by hand with a graf­fiti pen­cil to bring out the de­tail.

Web­site: www.​immagibert.​com