Artist and artisan, jeweller and lacemaker, Nature balances every moment of baroque expression with a moment of efficiency and economy. Usually, in fact, the contradictions come in pairs. Take, for example, the seashell-like radiolaria, a microscopic marine creature of vast geological age and diversity, whose delicate geometry serves to fortify the perfect radial symmetry of their skeletons. These creatures' glassy spines, ribbons and lattices, bars, beams, perforations and plates are fashioned from sand, a meticulously, microscopically repeated anatomy of individual parts woven together into a single unending fabric that looks both supple and unyielding. In fact, radiolaria have endured for hundreds of millions of years and evolved in such exuberant variety that they have also become markers of the passage of epochal time, in increments that humans can only imagine as eternities.
In his HyperBaroque collection, Arman Suciyan riffs on these themes. It is not surprising that Suciyan's sculptural approach to the design and craft of jewellry takes inspiration, this time, from the engraved illustrations of German zoologist Ernst Haeckel as well as the seemingly impossible Moebius strip imagined by German mathematician Frederic Moebius. Rendering the usually miniscule structure of radiolaria visible to the human eye, Suciyan reminds us, as Haeckel once wrote, that "man is not above nature, but in nature". His hyperbaroque rings, earrings, cufflinks and necklaces balance the complex and the irreducible. They depict endless interconnection, embody the measureless scale of time and celebrate a diversity that is indivisible.