Francesca U Jewellery

Francesca Urciuoli is an Italian jewellery designer and maker born in Perugia. She got her BFA at Alchimia, School of Contemporary Jewellery, and her MFA at SUNY New Paltz, NY. After her studies, she undertook several internships in the USA, UK and during that time, she learned to work with the Japanese Mokume Gane technique.  Since 2018 she is based in Berlin, Germany, where she started growing roots and working as a freelancer jewellery designer.  In September 2021 she opened her own Atelier, What If studio gallery, where she is currently teaching jewellery classes and developing new jewellery collections for her brand.

Francesca wants to make jewellery objects that work as relics, small-scale armours and at the same time as talismans. She is inspired by the Japanese culture, in particular by the Wabi-sabi aesthetic and Kinzugi technique, where the concept of beauty relates to something imperfect, ephemeral and sometimes incomplete or perhaps broken. Vulnerability becomes the strength.

Knots are often shapes and motifs that she uses as means of connection, memory and mend.

Her goal is to create a sense of worn with her jewellery pieces, adding some “Imperfections”, a reminder of transiency and time passing, often translated into rough textures on the surface.  They draw us with curiosity and allow us to create our own stories lost in time.  Francesca uses mostly silver in her work, as well as, Mokume-Gane and shibuichi.