12 October 2026
Artist Highlight - Ana Luisa Braun
Interview and Review
Ana Luísa Braun is a Brazilian jewellery artist and gemologist based in London. Trained in product design in Brazil and in marketing in Paris and now based in London, her practice sits at the intersection of traditional Brazilian craft and contemporary jewellery, developed in collaboration with artisan communities. During her MA at Central Saint Martins, Braun developed a collection guided by Brasília’s modernist restraint and Brazil’s biodiversity, exploring how culturally specific materials and methods can redefine luxury through human time, authorship, and ethical relationships.
ARTIST INTERVIEW
1. What made you want to reveal their existing value rather than transform them into something unrecognisable?
I was interested in working with materials that already hold beauty, history and meaning. Rather than disguising their origins, I wanted to create conditions for people to notice qualities that are often overlooked. Golden grass, fish scales and crystal already possess texture and luminosity. My role was less about transformation and more about framing — inviting a closer encounter with what is already there and questioning why some materials are considered precious while others are not.
2. How does the specificity of capim dourado change the way you approach jewellery?
Capim dourado cannot be separated from the territory, ecosystem and community that sustain it. Working with it requires acknowledging those relationships rather than treating it as a neutral material. The jewellery becomes a way of carrying stories of place, craft and environmental knowledge. This specificity encourages a slower and more attentive design process, where material, people and landscape are considered as interconnected rather than independent elements.
3. You work directly with the Mumbuca community and other artisans. How do you think about authorship when knowledge, technique and material are shared?
I see authorship here as something collective rather than individual. The project would not exist without the knowledge preserved and transmitted by artisan communities over generations. My role is to create dialogue between these inherited techniques and my own design language, while recognising that the materials and making processes already carry histories beyond my authorship. For me, it is less about ownership and more about collaboration, respect and making visible the networks of knowledge that allow the work to exist.
4. Where do you think true preciousness sits in these works?
For me, preciousness is not defined by rarity or market value alone. It emerges through relationships: between people and materials, between knowledge and making, and between objects and memory. In Shimmer, value comes from cultural heritage, craftsmanship, ecological specificity and the stories embedded within each material. The collection proposes that something can be precious because of the connections it carries, not simply because it is expensive or difficult to obtain.
5. After seeing Shimmer, what would you like people to reconsider about craft, material value and the meaning of Brazilian identity in contemporary jewellery?
I hope people leave questioning how value is constructed and what we choose to recognise as precious. Brazilian identity is often reduced to simplified or exoticised narratives, but I wanted to show its complexity through materials, craftsmanship and regional knowledge that are deeply connected to specific communities and histories. More broadly, I hope the work encourages a greater appreciation for craft as a form of knowledge and for materials whose value lies not in scarcity, but in the cultural and human relationships they embody.
NOT DISGUISED
Review by Sara Chyan, Curator
Ana Luísa Braun’s Shimmer brings together golden grass, fish scales and crystal without trying to make the materials look alike. The collection moves between very different surfaces, from long, clean lines of capim dourado to dark pieces that still clearly resemble the scales they came from.
The fish-scale pieces are the least familiar as jewellery. Worn across the hand, they fold around the skin in broad, irregular shapes. Their edges and surface remain visible, so there is still a slight hesitation before they register as adornment. I like that they have not been polished into something easier to recognise.
The golden grass pieces behave very differently. The earrings are long and precise, falling beside the neck in straight bundles, while the necklace brings the material into a much more familiar jewellery format. Capim dourado already has a metallic colour, so it can look luxurious without pretending to be gold. That resemblance is interesting because it exposes how quickly appearance affects the value we give a material.
Ana works with the Mumbuca community and other Brazilian artisans, and she describes authorship as something shared rather than belonging to the designer alone. That part of the project cannot really be seen in a finished earring. The object does not tell us who holds the knowledge behind its making. The way the work is credited and presented therefore matters just as much as the jewellery itself.
I am less interested in simply calling these materials “precious”. That risks replacing one category with another. The collection is more convincing when it makes me notice why I am quicker to accept crystal or a gold-coloured surface as valuable than a fish scale.
The materials in Shimmer have been carefully worked, but their origins have not disappeared. Ana gives them a place in jewellery without asking them to pretend they were something else.