There’s a buzz surrounding Atelier Zobel, since the Couture Show in Las Vegas honoured us with the prestigious Couture Design award for silver jewellery. We won with Nectar, our amber, bee-themed necklace. The amber was ground into a natural hexagonal shape before being combined with precious metals and diamonds.
Nectar was created for our summer exhibition collection, inspired by one of nature’s great design triumphs, the honeycomb. As our own head designer Peter Schmid puts it: ‘The honeycomb is the perfect balance of stability, material and time, and the bee always makes a hexagon exactly the right size. The bee instinctively creates the optimum form out of chaos, and the optimum form is the most beautiful.’
Alongside the stylistic perfection of the honeycomb, Nectar also celebrates the crucial contribution bees make to ecology and the natural cycle.
The collection owes much to Atelier Zobel’s recent collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and the University of Constance. The theme of our collaboration was ‘Art goes Science’, drawing on the behaviour of insects, and especially bees. This is the principal focus of Professor Iain Couzin, chair of the faculty of Biodiversity and Collective Behaviour. He stresses that a bee colony becomes vastly more than the sum of its individual. ‘This distributed intelligence, also known as swarm intelligence, is incredibly fascinating, and certainly instructive when it comes to the collective behaviour of people.’
Peter Schmid adds that the collaboration has opened the way to further work and collections. He looks forward to ‘projects in which we aren’t just concerned with the beautiful forms we encounter in life, but also with the natural processes that make them possible.’ In other words, there’s much more to come. Creative ideas are being well pollinated at Atelier Zobel.