This project explores jewellery-making through the slow, tactile process of hand-processing agave into natural cordage. Following traditional string-making methods—harvesting, drying, wetting, retting, twisting, and weaving—I transformed locally sourced agave leaves into functional alternatives to commercial jewellery cords.
The work is conceived as a collaboration: between myself as maker, the agave as material and co-author, and filmmaker Louis du Pisani, whose lens documents and extends the making process. Rather than shaping matter into predetermined forms, I work by following the material—responding to its textures, resistance, and possibilities as they emerge.
This approach fosters a deepened connection to place, to seasonal cycles, and to the Graaff-Reinet landscape that both the agave and I inhabit. Instead of representing nature symbolically, the jewellery embodies it through process. The resulting pieces carry the traces of their becoming, inviting the wearer to engage with them not as static objects, but as participants in an ongoing relationship between intention, action, material, and time.