- By
- Hannah Brockway
- Photography by
- Josh Olins
ARTIST CONIE VALLESE'S MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER INSPIRED HER COLLECTION FOR AGMES
Inspired by the simple, elegant styles of her mother and grandmother, the artist Conie Vallese has channeled the debonaire essence of her family’s matriarchs into a new jewelry collaboration with the young label AGMES filled with her eye-capturing sculpture pieces balanced with silver and pearl accents. The collection incorporates Vallese’s plaster head sculptures, which feature agape mouths, warped faces, and distorted expressions, covered in sterling silver and eighteen-karat gold vermeil.
“It’s a very easy material to make and remake and change, so I did the shape with clay and then I made a cast of it,” Vallese explains about the process of creating the intricate molds compared to her usual larger-scale art. “I used plaster and then that was the one we used for the collection. That is what we cast in silver. It was very much creating a sculpture and then making it a beautiful piece of jewelry.” Looking at Vallese’s sculptures is almost like staring at an optical illusion: The more you focus on the piece, the more details and perspectives emerge. It is precisely Vallese’s malleability and ability to warp perceptions that make her sculptures so engaging and so translatable into wearable pieces.
The line includes a range of chokers (Vallese’s favorite type of necklace), earrings, and brooches, all named after her mother and grandmother as an homage to their personal styles. Both women were reference points and big influences on the woman Vallese has grown to become. She reminisces on her mother’s big coats with ever bigger brooches and how they always drew her eye when growing up, as well as both women’s knack for vintage and antique statement pieces spanning a multitude of decades. “I always admired [my mother’s] pieces of jewelry. They were always very specific and artisan, made by hand,” Vallese recalls. “I always wanted to create a jewelry collection. For me, it’s a really nice collaboration with AGMES. I really appreciate the way they work and the women that they represent and their style.”
This collaboration is not Vallese’s first romp with sisters Morgan and Jaclyn Solomon, the founders of AGMES—the artist has also modeled for a number of the jewelry line’s previous campaigns. The three women share their core values and are inspired by urban landscapes, architecture, and modern art, as well as a sense of duty to produce a sustainable product with minimal harmful waste. It’s no wonder Vallese decided to collaborate with the sisters behind AGMES, who are “dedicated to creating pieces that will become modern heirlooms and embody a sense of timelessness.”
The development timeline for AGMES changes a bit each season, but on average it takes about three to four months to create a collection, says art director Jaclyn Solomon. The process starts with Jaclyn researching and sketching out ideas which she then reviews with Morgan. After this step, they asked Vallese to create her prototype sculpture and then continued to make additional rounds of modifications in order to further refine the pieces. Once they were perfected, chains and pearls and all, the designs went into production.
After this first taste of what goes into designing and creating jewelry, Vallese is already hungry for more. “Jewelry for me, depending on how you do it, is a sort of sculpture. I have even myself thought about doing a personal sculpture, brass jewelry collection,” she reveals. But when pried for more details, she laughs and shrugs the question to the side: “At some point one day I will show. I’m taking it very slow, it’s a process.”
Vallese’s Esther and Sappho designs are now available. For more information, please visit AGMESNYC.com.
- By
- Hannah Brockway
- Photography by
- Josh Olins
