Fouquet’s Broken Heart

The inspiration for this piece was the unusual beauty of the opal. It is cracked like a three-dimensional puzzle, i.e. its elements overlap. In the Art Deco museum in Paris, there is a work by Georges Fouquet, which creates the form of a “thorny heart” – like the fruit of a physalis with a centrally arranged opal, cut into 4 parts.

This piece is an interpretation of George Fouquet’s original necklace. Tiny cubic zirconias are embedded between the cracked fragments of the opal, which emphasize the presence of the crack lines. This is a reference to the Japanese technique of repairing broken vessels with gold, “kintsugi”, and to the aesthetic philosophy (wabi-sabi) that says that beauty lies in imperfection, in what is fragile, ephemeral, aged and worn by the tooth of time. The passage of time and painful experiences leave their mark on a person, but they create their history, make them more beautiful and interesting.

The piece was showcased during the “Fairy tales written with silver” exhibition in the Distrcit Museum in Toruń, Poland (2023) and during GemGeneve in Geneva, Switzerland (2023).

Material: 925 silver, opal, zircons, 24k gold flakes, amethysts

Year of creation: 2020

Silver 925

Dimensions: 8cm x 7cm

Weight: 63,2 g