Interview With shaun leane

Shaun Leane: The Art Will Turn To Dust, But Jewellery Will Live On

It takes a special kind of sensibility to have a career and body of work which is so beautifully able to suspend life’s challenges while offering an antidote to them. To create work which not only empowers but celebrates, allowing for those who engage with it a talisman of difference and connection. Shaun Leane is one of those artists. Over a long and lustrous career, Leane has created some of the most celebrated pieces of jewellery, collaborated intimately with Alexander McQueen, and has made tiaras and jewels for royalty. He has pushed the boundaries of contemporary jewellery and continues to inspire the next generation. I met with Shaun and spoke about history, transformation, and metallic affinities.

Brendton Steele: I want to begin with your recent move to Ireland. Having grown up in Finsbury Park, has the quietness of the Irish countryside birthed new inspiration? And how does the juxtaposition of these two worlds operate within yourself and your creativity?

Shaun Leane: You know, I think it always has. As a child, we would go and visit Ireland, and my grandmother lived on the highest mountain in the country. My cousins and I would play on its faces, the fields, and the meadows. We’d climb the hawthorn trees and see for miles. I didn’t realise until later those experiences are my blueprint. I was surrounded by the freedom of nature, but also death. In Ireland, we celebrate death in a totally different way than in England. When there was a death in the family, we would have an open coffin, and the body would be in the living room for two days before the burial. So, from a young age, I had seen and kissed the foreheads of many a dead body. In the farmlands, too, you would see death all the time. I would see the crows pluck and eat the eyes of the lambs and watch as their bodies turned to bones within a day, because all the other animals would feed on it. I saw death, but you see, I saw death as a part of life. All this language was there, in this undercurrent. When I began to build my career, this blueprint came out, and the energy of London allowed me to take those elements of nature, of death, and create beautiful jewellery which empowered women in a really natural way.

So, it’s not any different. My designs are getting more romantic now, as I spend half my time in Ireland, it’s a very romantic place after all, how could they not?

How did you first come to jewellery? Was there always a draw towards it, or was it rather something which found you in time, or by accident?

Jewellery wasn’t something I thought I would end up in. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was really lost. I was a rebellious child in a school with only the bare bones of an arts education. I walked out. Was sent back, walked out again. They just couldn’t keep me there. I just wanted to draw and to make, and, I suppose, being fourteen, in the eighties, the first thing that would come to mind is fashion. But I was too young to go to fashion school, I didn’t have any qualifications or anything. With the help of a career officer, I got a place on a jewellery design course which paid £33 a week, and that could buy me a lot of cigarettes, so I said “Yes! Where’s the dotted line?”

When I sat down at the bench for the first time there was silence, and my purpose was born. I found an escape and through the creation I found my voice. A voice of difference.

The course was a yearlong and I completed it in six months. I began messing around in class and taking all the other students to the pub and getting them absolutely shit faced –

On your £33 a week.

(Laughs) I tell you what, £33 got you a lot in those days! My tutor begged me to keep following this path, putting me in contact with English Traditional Jewellery, who made pieces for the Royal Family. So, I went and had phenomenal training, being sat amid two masters who taught me everything about goldsmithing, restoration, art nouveau, art deco, Victorian, and Edwardian jewels. It was incredible. It was classic, really classic. When I look back, I’m so grateful because it was my saviour. And then, through a moment of serendipity, I met Lee [Alexander McQueen].

They met in 1991, aged twenty-two. The infamous collaborations lasting eighteen years, designing for the houses of Alexander McQueen and Givenchy – where Lee was Creative Director between 1996-2001 – until Lee’s death in 2010. Shaun debuted his work in the AW95 McQueen show, Highland Rape, making Victorian-inspired T-Bars.

How did the partnership start, and what was it about McQueen which allowed you to open yourself up to new possibilities of design?

We were introduced by a mutual friend who studied alongside him at Saint Martins. After I finished making tiaras for the Queen, I would hop on the Tube and meet them in their studio, and we’d party around Soho. I remember seeing the work they were doing, and I thought “these people are crazy!” but unbeknownst to me, Lee and I were so similar and very, very connected in life experiences and, more importantly, our classical trainings. Me in Hatton Garden and Lee on Saville Row.

When Lee asked to work with me, I immediately said no. I was a goldsmith, working with diamonds and all these very precious materials; I was making tiaras, for God’s sake. Neither of us had any money to make large fine jewellery for runway shows! I had just finished my apprenticeship, he had just graduated, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea. But Lee was ahead of me and ahead of everybody, to be honest. He said “Shaun, we’re not going to work in gold and diamonds. We’re going to work in aluminium, copper, brass, and feathers”. It was then when my thinking changed. He said, “if you just trust yourself, your skill, you can make anything”.

Looking at your body of work, from the McQueen years, and your own brand, I sense a historical sensibility to everything. Where the pieces exist across multiple temporalities with a contemporary edge. How are you able to so beautifully fuse these points of inspiration into something so singular and complete?

When I created pieces like the Tusk earring and other pieces for McQueen, I wanted to celebrate the feminine in all its nuances. Like the Coil Corset, for example. You know, that is a piece of armour, yet it follows the curve of the body to every centimetre. It celebrates the form in a way which is almost sensual – you just want to touch it because it’s fluid and approachable. But it’s still armour.

It’s not an ‘addition’, it isn’t expanding outwards or overly chunky. It’s just like a layer of skin, but hardened.

Lee and I had those hybrid ways of thinking down to a fine art. If you want to question, or provoke, and particularly if you want to question in form, or shape, or silhouette, or voice, even politically, it must be done with delicacy and craftsmanship. Sometimes, the works are meant to look grotesque, but you’re like, “God, isn’t it beautiful?”. You don’t want to look away; it’s too intriguing.

It’s about owning the right, through the understanding of craft and its heritage. It’s about the respect of heritage. The respect of my training. The eight hundred years of craft passed down to me, the same with Lee and his tailoring. I don’t copy the history, I reference it. We both loved history and culture(s). I never copy them, but expand on them, I use it to change. I use it in my form, and in my handwriting, in a modern voice. I had to learn to construct before I could deconstruct.

I read somewhere your company was the second in the country to acquire a 3D printer, and this radical approach to jewellery has been a constant. I guess the partnership with McQueen widened your ability to see beyond the traditional.

The beauty of working with Lee was how I grew. I learnt how to carve larger objects; I taught myself taxidermy, electroforming, and to work with all kinds of metals. I grew and as I did, so did my voice.

Jewellery is the medium I use to express my deepest secrets, my happiest moments, my pains, celebrations, my love of nature, and of growth. I really come at everything, first at foremost, from an emotion, a human emotion.

Like when I made the Rose Corset, you can’t see the details in a photo – the slash of skin that’s been peeled back – that’s what I love about what Lee, and I did. People look at it and think: “Oh, it’s lovely, it’s adorned with roses”, where really, that piece reflected being hurt. And cut. No matter what, you can hurt the surface, but you can never destroy what’s within. And what’s within are the roses, and they bloom, and they come out. Like Angelou said, “I’ll rise”. The roses will bloom. And I will.

Someone copied that piece recently, I think it was Balmain, and I laughed when I saw it. For someone like me, making jewellery for forty years, and to see a piece I made in my twenties, inspire designers that age today, it shows what I did was timeless. But they don’t get it, they made a clean body and stuck roses on, it looked unfinished and totally missed the concept. But I’m very flattered.    

Going off that, there is an essence to your designs which extends beyond adornment and towards something powerful and provocative. Forging realms where one is offered strength and understanding. Is this something you’ve noticed as more people collect your pieces?

A lot of people nowadays make jewellery to shock, but the jewellery is quite clumsy or large, or it goes too far in one way or another. It’s a fine line one must walk. A piece of jewellery, for me, should complement, and reflect the person who’s wearing it. It isn’t there to overpower the person; it can’t steal the limelight!

You’ve said how the woman you design for is a warrior – romantic and strong – yet vulnerable. How does this approach show up in the work and appeal to multiple generations and personalities?

If we take the Hook earring, for example, the collection comes from its mother influence, the Tusk earring. The Tusk was used to portray confidence, strength, and protection. Now, all of us, no matter who we are, may need a different level of all three of those qualities. Imagine a person who is really cool, they have an edge, she’s covered head-to-toe in Rick Owens, and she has this Hook earring in. She’s shouting her confidence. Then you have a woman who works in an office, maybe who is a bit more understated, when she wears the Hooks, she’s tapping into a confidence she wants to develop or grow! The earrings allow her an entry to what she wants. They’re a key of sorts. What I love about my work is that it touches and speaks to everybody at every stage of their journey.

As my collection has built up, the pieces have taken on a different meaning. At one point, I felt cool wearing them, and they helped me be like “fuck it, I have this!”, when now I feel like they were always meant to be a part of me, I can’t see myself without them. They’re –

They’re you, now. They’ve done their job. See this is what I love, and it’s not just about tapping into confidence; it’s truly about enhancing it, or remembering the confidence one used to have. That’s why even women who are eighty-five buy those earrings. When they wear them, they can access the energy they had in their twenties or thirties. It touches the eighteen-year-old and the eighty-five-year-old. It’s about memory, about life, about aspirations.

I’ve adopted this artist pseudonym of Steele (replacing my surname) as I wanted something strong, which can endure, and metal is exactly that. Do you see in yourself some affinity, or metaphysical connection, to the materials themselves?

Working with these materials, like what you’ve done with your name, I found an inner strength which I was always searching for. But, as I’ve gotten older, as I’ve honed my craft, I’ve realised what’s beautiful about metal is the multitude of properties each one possesses. Some are softer, some are harder, others are brighter, or duller, or oxidise quicker. They all have their own beautiful qualities. When we think of metal, we think of hardness. And strength. Yes, it is those things, but treated well, and under the right conditions, it can become very durable, very soft, bendable. It becomes changeable. Like, it can even be more fluid than water!

Over the years, I’ve turned metal into many different forms and shapes, all these things I wanted it to be. You know, in life, everything can change – it’s just understanding and actually knowing how best to nurture something. What metal has taught me, more than anything, is to be forever teachable and forever changeable.

You’re never fully set.

Never, and I never will be. I have proven through my skill and openness, I am adaptable. You can give me a lump of metal and I could make it into anything. You could show me something and say, “This is formidable, this is strong”, and I will, before your very eyes, turn it into a puddle. It’s perception.

When I think about metal, and jewellery, I think of the lineage within it. I mean, we have jewellery dating all the way back to the neanderthals, for instance.

I love metal for that reason. It’s so strong and can be the same thing for so many years. If you think about it, jewellery is the record of history. The art will crumble, the canvas will rot, and the paper will turn to dust. After the hard drives have disintegrated, the gold will return to the soil and stay in its exact form. Jewellery tells a lot about a civilisation, it speaks to how artistic they were, their abilities and techniques. It tells the story of innovation, from the cavemen to the Victorians, who were the most phenomenal innovators. If we’re talking about the power of jewellery, and metal in general, I wear this mourning ring. I can feel the sadness in it. The gentleman it honours, James Brambury, died at sixty-eight in 1782, and here I am wearing it! Isn’t that incredible? That’s jewellery, that’s its power. I hope in the future, people will come across my work, and it will reflect the times we’re in.