A piece of gold
A conversation with Ami Masamitsu, a jewellery designer who is reframing what we choose to treasure.
On meeting Ami for the first time, I had a mouthful of salmon onigiri.
I’d walked along the Skirakawa River in Sakyo-ku to try ‘Kyoto’s best’ rice ball and had plumped for salted salmon and pickled plum. Each was individually wrapped in an origami style fold and carried its own message. “Have a nice day” was embossed on the salmon, “good luck,” on the pickled plum.
Ami ordered after me: tuna mayo onigiri and a cup of miso soup.
When she tapped her card to pay, I noticed that her fingers glinted with gold and silver rings.
Ao Onigiri was her local, she explained. Just a ten-minute walk from her apartment, which she’d recently moved into with her boyfriend and young daughter.
We struck up a conversation, and she told me she’d studied jewellery at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2017. “Come see me!” she beamed, jotting an address in neat handwriting on the back of my onigiri wrapper.
The next day, I met Ami at her studio.
It was small, and full of odds and ends of good design. White walls, lots and lots of books on art and design: Naum Gabo, Isamu Goguchi, Barbara Hepworth. Open on a coffee table was a paper about Glass Works by Laura de Santillana, lit by the soft white light of a vintage lamp with a 1960s, Star-Wars-esque shape. “This year’s Christmas gift to myself,” Ami laughed, explaining it was a Lindner art piece designed by Wilhelm Wagenfeld.
Her workroom was even more bijou and had lots of shelves with tiny draws filled with tiny things – delicate chains, wire cutters, pieces of twisted metal. Ami opened a painted wagara box to show me more tiny things – shells and stones – or “micro treasures” she’d found on a beach in Kyoto. These are the kinds of materials she seems to lean towards – modest objects that she’s collected and treasured.
Today, Ami primarily works in gold. But that hasn’t always been the case. “I started by making jewellery with materials I liked – drilling holes and combining them with metal chains or string”, she explained. During her time at Tokyo University of the Arts, she sold handmade plastic earrings and necklaces to fund her studies. “I liked the immediacy. You could make a hole in something, add a chain, and suddenly it was wearable.”
This simple act – of making the ordinary wearable – remains central to her practice. Ami’s work takes the unassuming and, with precision and grace, transforms it into something quietly extraordinary. Safety pins, earring backs, fasteners: all are reimagined as objects of elegance.
A silver bracelet clings to her wrist as she gestures, stretched from the form of a safety pin into an elegant abstraction. Its sterling silver finish and clean cut reject the disposability of its origin while retaining the functionality of its shape.
Her rings are studded with stones – blue chalcedony, orange moonstone, dark onyx – cut in forms that are precise but unprecious: leaning triangles, skewed squares, irregular octagons. Each stone teeters above a thin white-gold band.
In the middle of the room stood a wooden topped workbench with cherry red metal legs. On its surface, an undone necklace made from chains looped together in flower bud-like clusters.
Frieze is the name of this piece, and of the small series it later became part of. A frieze, in classical terms, is a decorative design element located within the entablature of a building – here, in Ami’s hands, it is reconceived as something to drape around the body, rather than the wall.
This idea of recontextualising everyday forms continues throughout her practice. Things that could easily be discarded – a pin, a scrap, a shell – are reconsidered. Her work is less about reinventing materials than about reframing how we see them. “My ideal piece of jewellery is one where both functionality and artistic expression coexist in balance,” she told me.
Her work celebrates easily overlooked items such as safety pins or earring backs, taking their simplicity and making things that are beautiful and intricate. “My ideal piece of jewellery is one where both functionality and artistic expression coexist in balance.”
When I ask which materials she likes to work with, the designer replies instantly: “Gold is my favourite.” “It’s gleam, eternal value and high malleability have always attracted humans from ancient times to the present, producing countless fascinating stories”, she gushes.
This affection is evident in her ‘Embroideries’ series: a collection of very thin gold rings that echo the gestures of hand-sewing. Just 0.4mm thick, each flat band is adorned with letters and patterns that have beencomposed like paintings and glued one by one with meticulous handwork. ‘Mind the gap’, exclaims one, ‘still sleeping’, yawns another. My favourite: the face of a cat, finished with oxidized 18 carat yellow gold paws and whiskers. The finer details of these pieces – paws, whiskers and other ‘embroidered’ elements, are made from the finer gold, soldered on top of thin oxidised gold bands.
The thinness and angular nature of certain pieces echoes the nature of kintsugi – the Japanese art of repair, which uses gold to bind broken ceramics. Perhaps less in a literal sense, but more in her approach to value: that something small, fragile, or even broken, can still hold worth. That it might, in fact, be the imperfection – or the overlooked detail – that makes it beautiful.
“Jewellery is most compelling when it brings out the full potential of its materials”, said the designer, pointing to pieces of gold in various cuts and tones. The oxidised metal is cheaper and more durable, but “gold is the material that provokes the desire to wear”, she affirmed.
It feels as though each ‘embroidery’, each of Ami’s pieces, for that matter, is an exploration of the weight of gold - its presence, its absence and the shifting boundaries of what luxury might mean today. By looking at how jewellery can be made thinner, lighter and use less gold, she proposes a new way of using the material in a world where its price is constantly rising.