SO MINT! HELENA PALMEIRA

Current Obsession: What story or idea does your graduation work explore, and why was it important for you to tell it now?

Helena Palmeira: My graduation work explores ideas of value through materials deeply rooted in Brazil’s cultural and ecological landscape, such as reclaimed jacarandá wood, hand-carved jarina seeds, and Brazilian gemstones. I wanted to see how jewellery might hold more than adornment, how it could become a vessel for memory and identity, a space of tension between material and body, softness and rigidity, visibility and invisibility.

Each piece begins with a material that already carries a story, often overlooked or sometimes displaced, and is then bound, pressed, or embedded against the body in ways that are at once subtle and disruptive. In doing so, I tried to challenge conventional ideas of preciousness, shifting attention instead to intimacy: the trace of process, the marks of wear, the narratives embedded in form.

The materiality of Brazil, its textures, its contrasts, its complexities, underpins this body of work. It felt important, at this moment of beginning, to place those materials at the centre, to let them speak, to show their richness and their potential, and to ask how they might reshape our sense of value and of making.

CO: Who or what has shaped your practice in unexpected ways?

HP: In 2024, I visited Brazil: Creating Fashion for Tomorrow, an exhibition in London celebrating Brazilian design. By chance, I met curator Lilian Pacce, who showed me a piece made of jarina, a seed often called vegetable ivory for its smooth, bone-like texture. I had never encountered it before, but the material stayed with me. I began tracing its origins and uses, and it soon became central to my collection.

That encounter shifted the direction of my work. What started as an exploration of form grew into a deeper investigation of Brazilian material culture, of the tactile, symbolic, and ecological potential of substances often overlooked in contemporary jewellery.

Once my collection was complete, I wrote to Lilian to thank her. She asked to see the finished pieces, and soon after selected the work for the 2025 edition of Brazil: Creating Fashion for Tomorrow, presented during London Climate Action Week just two days after my Degree Show at Central Saint Martins. It was an unexpected and meaningful turn, shaping not only the collection but also the beginning of my practice.

CO: Does your work reflect or respond to a cultural context or issue that’s personal to you?

HP: My work is rooted in the cultural and material context of Brazil, something that feels both personal and political to me. I was born there, but have lived the last years elsewhere, and my practice has become a way of reconnecting with a place I know at once intimately and from a distance.

Through materials like reclaimed jacarandá, jarina, and Brazilian gemstones, I explore value, memory, and identity, not as fixed ideas but as things shaped by context and tension. Many of these materials carry layered histories of extraction, displacement, and transformation. I am interested in how they can be reinterpreted through jewellery in ways that are sensitive, critical, and grounded in care.

This way of working became especially important as I began to define my voice as a designer. Placing Brazilian materiality at the centre felt like a way to both honour and question its legacy, to create from it rather than about it. The personal connection gives the work its emotional weight, but it also opens up wider conversations about sustainability, colonial histories, and what we choose to call ‘precious’.