A garden of symbols with a horseman at its gate

Spring, 2026

Today, aside from its original meaning of a handwritten book, document or piece of music, a manuscript can commonly refer to an author’s typed text that has not yet been published into a final form. This modern definition loosens the boundaries of preconceived structures and timelines, just enough for my ongoing explorations to hopefully, one day, reach the gateways of all the symbols Carl Franz Koch has archived precisely two centuries ago. Eager to delve into this space of abundant entanglements, I have made it my mission to break the dormancy of these medieval Transylvanian Saxon markings into a new cycle of perception. 

As a jewellery artist, I work with the tools and craftsmanship I have garnered and developed over the course of the past nine years. A time of learning and unlearning, through which I have come to realise how my making process relates more to an alchemical type of practice than to what would generally describe a contemporary jeweller’s craft. 

In my world, curiosity overrides convention, as I intuitively tempt things out into being by way of fire and water. Whether I experiment with wax, metal, paper, or with sculpting, shaping and collaging different elements together in abstract compositions, or symbolic correspondences, I always circle back to the fundamental creative principles these two primordial forces entail. While fire softens, melts, welds, transforms and purifies, the elemental fluidity of water allows chance to factor into the works, by shaping the melting material I cast onto its surface, in the most unpredictable of ways. Water thus becomes the very vessel within which free forms arise. 

I have only recently learned how this water casting process is not dissimilar to hydromancy, an ancient divination technique originating from Persia, and popular in cultures across Europe, and how it was used to predict one’s fortunes. I have often imagined the suspended moment in time and space that one such teller would have carved out of the material world for a fellow human being, by means of silvery water. Yet, just like when looking into a shiny mirror, what is reflected back is never just the tangible, but also the imagined. 

This requires a conscious adventure of perception, one that I recognise to have had anchored my creative pursuits ever since I can remember, and it is probably why writing and researching A garden of symbols with a horseman at its gate, marries  so naturally with my jewellery making techniques. 

Within the context of this new venture, the alchemical coniuntio of the two opposing forces of fire and water fizzes with the creative potential to inspire a new way of seeing these simple, medieval symbols, characteristic to the Transylvanian Saxon communities that settled in this part of the world eight centuries ago. I delve into an open-ended investigation of their shapes, history and potential meanings, guided by the same subtle processes with which I bring my handcrafted pieces to life. As I follow different hints and cues, each symbol reveals how its inherent affinities to the immense entanglement of everything are naturally bound to reach beyond the factual.