Fragments of Memory

In October 2023, VON ARA took Cape Town to Milan. Founder Lara Landsberg was selected to exhibit at Artistar Jewels — the contemporary jewellery exhibition held at the historic Palazzo Bovara during Milano Jewellery Week — showing two pieces alongside more than 200 artists from 40 countries.

Bold and unapologetic on the surface. And, underneath, deeply personal. Because the two works Lara brought to Milan were among the most intimate she has ever made.

Both belong to a body of work about memory — its fragility, and the way it quietly comes apart. The theme was drawn from her grandmother's diagnosis of vascular dementia, and from a lifetime of making things side by side.

Shallow Depth

Necklace — glazed porcelain, felt thread, sterling silver, embroidery thread

Before her diagnosis, Lara's grandmother was a woman of every craft — a potter, a ceramicist, a maker of things. From a young age, Lara sat beside her in those pottery classes. As the illness progressed, her grandmother passed her tools down to Lara, who kept using them: shaping her own ceramics, and turning a single glazed porcelain vessel into something wearable.

Cracked open and strung on a soft yellow cord, Shallow Depth holds a whole inheritance in one small, broken form — a craft handed down, and still in use.

Fragmentation

Brooch — crushed porcelain beads, enamel, copper, sterling silver, Perspex, enamel paint

If Shallow Depth is about what's passed on, Fragmentation is about what's lost. Here, Lara turned the lens on herself — on the way even a young memory distorts, slips and breaks, just as her grandmother's had.

She shattered porcelain beads collected on her travels overseas and set the fragments against polished Perspex, so clarity and distortion sit side by side.

It is memory made physical: sharp, beautiful, and impossible to put back together the same way twice.

An open ending

True to how Lara works, neither piece tells you what to feel. She builds her jewellery to stay open — to let whoever encounters it bring their own memory, their own grandmother, their own sense of what's slipping away.

That is the thread running through everything VON ARA makes — from an exhibition case in Milan to a bespoke ring on a Cape Town hand. Jewellery designed to mean something. Wearable art with a story worth keeping.