ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Italy to an Italian journalist father and an American mother, Francesca Lacagnina spent her first decade living in some of the great cities of antiquity—Cairo, Beirut, Athens and Rome. When her parents divorced, she moved with her mother and sister to San Francisco. "Both my parents were very European, very classical, in their styles," she describes. "My father had that elegance that's so quintessentially Italian. And in the way that they both lived, the way they surrounded themselves with beauty, and the rich visual language I was exposed to as a child, all of these have deeply influenced me.

" Francesca enjoyed a successful career in both fine art and commercial photography for more than 20 years. In the late 1980s, she co-created the photo illustrations for a book on the writings of Gertrude Stein, Is Money Money. The resulting densely layered images and multiple exposures were a radical departure for editorial photography, one that helped launch a new approach to illustration that's widely used today.

For Francesca, making jewelry began as a personal exploration, one she hadn't intended to pursue as a vocation. "I have always loved working with my hands," she notes. "Making jewelry, I found my true medium, where my ideas flow easily, the process of creating pieces is fluid,… and the end result is textured and tactile and feels good—and has that feeling of being made by hand. I like making pieces that people can wear every day, that become a part of who they are—and yet have an elemental feel, as though someone has worn them over the centuries.

ABOUT THE WORK

Francesca works with no set ideas, preferring to work intuitively. She draws inspiration from the classical forms that informed her aesthetic as a child, and weds them to shapes and textures she finds in nature. Her garden and daily walks are continual sources of inspiration. Francesca's eye is drawn to the small, overlooked folds of nature: the intricate whorls of a fern; a seed pod's dense chambers; fat, convoluted flower buds; the details in a withered stalk of a dahlia; the anatomy of a pinecone—the underpinnings of life. There's a purity and a directness in these found objects that Francesca retains in her "finished" pieces. Everything is connected. "That's what I love about jewelry," she says. "It encompasses history, mythology, personal feelings. It connects with every culture and speaks to it. It connects us with the meanings of stones, their healing qualities." The forms of antiquity and of the natural world that find their way into Francesca's pieces are transformed by a modern sensibility, into jewelry that's fresh and contemporary, but never loses sight of its roots.