OCTI: Fossilising a Moment
PublishedWe went to see jewellery and found ourselves watching water make sound visible. That probably says quite a lot about OCTI’s SS27 presentation, Ammonite. The London-based jewellery designer took a...
We went to see jewellery and found ourselves watching water make sound visible.
That probably says quite a lot about OCTI’s SS27 presentation, Ammonite. The London-based jewellery designer took a familiar starting point - fossils found along rivers and coastlines, and followed it somewhere much less expected, into sound, mathematics, erosion and the question of whether something fleeting can somehow be preserved.
The ammonite itself is fascinating when you think about it. An organism disappears, its form remains, and millions of years later we recognise it by that unmistakable spiral. Water may soften and alter its surface along the way, but somehow the pattern survives.
OCTI translated this slow process into jewellery. Silver appears almost washed and worn, with salt-like textures, satin finishes and fluid surfaces. Sapphires sit among the metal like tiny droplets of water. Spirals, concentric shapes and repeating forms appear throughout, continuing the designer’s interest in the golden ratio and mathematical structures found in nature.
There are pieces you can play with too. Rings are designed to stack and interchange, allowing different compositions to form on the hand rather than prescribing one fixed way of wearing them.
But then the story moves beyond jewellery.
What does sound look like?
The presentation, created with sound and spatial designers Robin Sparkes and Bojan Kostović, placed the collection inside a larger experiment with water, movement and sound.
At its centre was a sculptural instrument holding cymbals created by OCTI, played using dripping silver finger caps. Nearby, a live cymatics performance used water to reveal sound through visible patterns.
It was one of those moments where you stop trying to immediately understand everything and simply watch.
The connection becomes clearer once you learn how OCTI works. Wax can capture the movement of liquid at a particular instant before that shape is cast in metal. A movement that would normally disappear is suddenly frozen into something permanent.
The instruments followed a similar thought: could music be fossilised too?
Something invisible and temporary, a vibration, a sound, a drop hitting a surface, was translated into physical structure.
Jewellery as preservation
This is perhaps the most interesting way into Ammonite. We tend to think about jewellery in terms of decoration, material value or sentiment. OCTI approaches it as a form of preservation.
A fossil preserves evidence of life. Jewellery can preserve a fragment of nature, a gesture, a memory. Music exists for a moment and disappears, yet here its patterns can leave a physical trace.
The presentation connected these ideas through the ancient concept of the Music of the Spheres, looking at the rhythms, proportions and repetitions shared by music, geology and mathematics. Once you start noticing those connections, the spiral of an ammonite suddenly doesn't feel so far away from the rhythm of a sound wave.
Ammonite asks you to look at a piece of jewellery and imagine everything that happened before it became still: water moving, surfaces eroding, sound vibrating, wax shifting, metal cooling.
What remains is the object. But somewhere inside it, the movement is still there.
