Field Notes 1.1 — From the Valley

A note on why GU exists, and why it begins with flowers

There is a sentence my husband said that I come back to, often.

We were talking about flowers — about giving them, about what they mean to the person who receives them. And he said: Flowers die. Why give fresh flowers?

He meant it one way. I heard it another.

Because there is something true in what flowers offer that we rarely let ourselves name. Not the object — the gesture behind it. The recognition of a moment, the marking of something that might otherwise pass unremarked. Flowers are given because words are not enough, and because beauty, however briefly, says something that language cannot.

What if that did not have to be temporary?

I grew up in Singapore, in a city that treats greenery as architecture. My love for nature and design found each other early. I trained in Florence in traditional jewellery making — wax-carving, hand-setting, the slow craft that lives in the hands. Eight years in fine jewellery followed. Along the way, I completed my GIA Coloured Gemstone certification part-time — drawn by a love for stones: the way a padparadscha reminds me of sunsets by the beach, the way a pigeon blood ruby reminds me of the roses my husband once gave me.

In those eight years I worked across every design language — geometric, minimalist, architectural, abstract. I could build all of it. But flowers were what I kept returning to. Not from sentiment alone. Something about botanical form kept pulling me back, above everything else I had made.

Nature is imperfect. A petal is never symmetrical. A leaf carries the mark of where rain fell, where something passed through. Recreating that imperfection — translating it into metal and stone — is what interests me.

Handmade jewellery is also, by nature, imperfect. No two pieces are identical, even from the same brief. Give the same flower reference to different craftsmen and you get different results — a slightly different curve in the petal, a different weight in the stem. Give it to different designers and the difference is wider still. We each hear the same form differently.

Many designers before me have looked to nature. The reference is not new. What is always new is the translation — the particular way a maker hears a flower and answers it. This is mine.

GU — 谷 — means valley in Chinese. From the valley, by hand. Things that grow slowly, out of sight, shaped by forces that take their time. Every piece begins as something fleeting and becomes something kept.

This journal is where the work is explained, slowly, to the people who want to understand it. Posts arrive when there is something worth saying, and not before.

From the Valley,