Lauren Adriana

London-based Lauren Adriana has been captivated by gems and minerals since she was five years old. She tells how she spent pocket money on pebbles in the Natural History Museum’s shop, progressing to cut gems in an indoor ‘hippie’ market, before discovering a talent for drawing and painting, and then studying 20th-century jewels and jewellery history in her teens. The path ahead was clear, and she graduated with a degree in jewellery design from Central St Martins in 2007, when her distinctive modernist style was already taking shape.  Today she works with her husband, Nicholas Briggs, from her central London studio, creating one-of-a-kind jewels that are unapologetically large in scale and presence, graphic, architectural, resolutely non-referential, and devoid of nostalgia. Adriana likes to plot complex structures that explore movement, light and shade, and the colours of intriguing gems for which she scours the world.   Her studies of the great 20th-century style leaders have given her an understanding of the jewel as an expression of individuality and the power of femininity.