Charlotte De Syllas, 78, is known for her carved hardstone jewelry, but don’t call her a lapidarist. “I don’t know why everyone uses that word now,” she said, somewhat exasperated. “I’m just a jeweler!”
A jeweler certainly, but one whose main practice consists of carving stone. She is equally adept at carving a gemstone, like tourmaline or amethyst, which has a certain translucency and is often more valuable, or a hardstone like jade or lapis lazuli, which is often opaque and considered an ‘ornamental’ stone that lends itself to being cut into softer-looking organic forms, sometimes abstract, sometimes literal.
It may be a necklace featuring two fish carved from brilliant blue lapis lazuli joined together by a stream of pearl bubbles, or a sea plant brooch of crimson tourmaline and dark green jade, so undulating in form it looks like it must have been cast from something molten rather than hewed from hard rock.
“I was going to do enamels,” Ms. De Syllas said by phone recently from her rural home in Norfolk, England.
“But when I went to Hornsey College of Art in the 1960s, my teacher Gerda Flöckinger taught me how to cut a cabochon, and I realized I could get the color I imagined I’d create with enamel from cold lumps of stone,” she said, referring to the smooth, dome-like cut of stone she learned to create.
Both Hornsey College of Art (now closed) and Ms. Flöckinger (an Austrian immigrant now in her late 90s) are legendary in British art-jewelry circles, Hornsey for its progressive approach to teaching the arts and Flöckinger for her own practice and for the unconventional jewelry course she pioneered at a time when traditional goldsmithing apprenticeships in Britain more often involved making generic pieces, rather than designing and making unique works.
Immediately after Ms. De Syllas completed her diploma in art and design at Hornsey in 1966, the college granted her a scholarship which she used to hitchhike around Nigeria sketching beads and researching their meaning, as well as teaching local bead makers how to use contemporary machinery. She then returned to London, where her mother gave her space in a garden shed to work.
“I’ve worked in all sorts of digs,” Ms. De Syllas said. “There were cupboards, and lavatories, and after I married we moved to Norfolk and had a room in a cottage without electricity, so I sold a necklace and bought a generator. We squatted in Hampstead for a while when we returned to London.”
Ms. De Syllas still works entirely on commission as she has since her earliest days, and it’s a process that suits her just fine. “At one point I was getting incredibly bored carving, so I applied for a grant to go and learn glass casting in Wolverhampton for a year,” she said, of the glass education she received in the city in central England. “It was a lovely year, but in the end I realized I could carve a jade necklace and get 10,000 pounds [$12,563 in current exchange rates] for it and it was no more labor intensive.”
It was through her parents — an interior designer mother and an architect father — that Ms. De Syllas met many of her first clients. In 1969, she received a commission from someone she described as “a very well known architect at the time, very nice, very quiet — the wife was very exuberant” and carved a Buddha-like head from gray chalcedony set atop a gold ring, perfectly nestled in a box carved from partridge wood depicting a pair of intertwined hands.
“When I do commissions, it’s very much to do with picking up the nature of the person and making something to suit them,” she said. “I don’t think about it. I just do it, quite frankly. That head ring was wonderful because the client wrote me a wonderful letter saying what it meant to him. The great thing was that it meant something to him!”
Ms. De Syllas’s work also resides in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. She has taught and given lectures on stone carving around the world. A winner of several awards, she most recently received an award for excellence from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust in 2022.
“Her work is very distinctive because of the fluidity and sensitivity she manages to achieve out of material that is hard and static,” Joanna Hardy, a fine-jewelry specialist based in London, said by email. Ms. De Syllas’s jewelry “reflects sophistication and discernment on the wearer,” Ms. Hardy added.
But if there’s one aspect of her career aside from making jewelry that sets her apart, it’s the stone-carving courses she holds four times a year in a shed abutting her house in the county of Norfolk, where I myself took the course last year.
“I very much enjoy the workshops,” Ms. De Syllas said. “But I’m not sure after 80 I’ll be capable.”
Lin Cheung, an English jeweler, took the five-day course in 2014. “Something profound happened when I cut my first stone in Charlotte’s workshop that day,” she said. “Something went pop inside me and I’ve been more than a little interested ever since.”
Cheung, who teaches jewelry design at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, creates minimalist works from stone, like bare rose-quartz pins complete with metal fasteners, or miniature “plastic” bags carved from rock crystal.
“I’m an annoying student, always the one with a million questions about the tiniest thing,” she said. “So the biggest lesson I learned through meeting Charlotte was after one day endlessly asking how I do this and that and what if, she said ‘why don’t you just cut the stone and see what happens? Sometimes the answer is in the doing and not in the thinking.’”
Since that course, Ms. Cheung’s work has been almost exclusively carved from stone, and she has won awards and traveled the world immersing herself in the lapidary community. “I have Charlotte to thank for all of it,” she said. “Charlotte is one of the most — if not the most — generous teachers, artists, people I have ever met.”
Nevertheless, Ms. De Syllas said, “Stone carving is a laborious art. You’ve got to know that you can do it. But I say I’m not a lapidary artist because I didn’t train in that. I’ve learned about stone by using it.”
