Golden Menagerie, Temple St. Clair

 With an artist’s eye and an explorer’s heart, Temple St. Clair fashions jewelry from rare colored gems with distinctive gold work to illustrate universal narratives of the earth and cosmos. In each of the one-of-a-kind pieces that comprise her Haute Couture collection, St. Clair explores our relationship to animals through a lens of whimsy and discovery and celebrates a connoisseur’s level of gemstones and Florentine craftsmanship. The Golden Menagerie offers an exclusive window into the alchemic jeweler’s process, illustrating the collection through St. Clair’s original watercolor paintings and luminous photography of each stage of creation. From the articulated Secret Garden Serpent necklace to vibrantly jeweled Fantasy Birds earrings to a ring mounted with a falcon ready to take flight from the wearer’s finger, St. Clair’s creations come to life on the page, imbued with alchemy and artistry.

Temple St. Clair discovered her passion for creative expression in gold and precious gemstones over thirty years ago. She founded her company in Florence, Italy, beginning her partnership with the world’s finest goldsmiths: the centuries-old Florentine jewelers’ guild. Barneys New York inaugurated their fine jewelry department with her first collection in 1986. St. Clair’s Golden Menagerie is a magical journey through each of her three Haute Couture collections: Mythical Creatures, Wings of Desire, and The Big Game. Mythical Creatures made its debut with a critically acclaimed exhibition at Paris’s Musée des Arts Decoratifs in January 2015; Wings of Desire was unveiled at The Salon: Art + Design in New York in November 2015; and The Big Game will be debuted at the DeLorenzo gallery in New York in December 2016. St. Clair’s collections are sold throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. In 2016, she was awarded the GEM Award for Jewelry Design, the jewelry industry’s most prestigious honor.

Since 2000, Dominique Forest has been the chief curator of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art and Jewelry at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre in Paris, and she participated in the opening of the jewelry gallery in 2006. She specializes in decorative arts from the 20th century and has authored several works on the subject, including French Brassware Between 1900 et 1950, Luc et Marjolaine Lanel and The Art of Things: Product Design Since 1945. She was previously the curator at the Magnelli Museum in Vallauris, France, where she developed a pilot program to invite designers to work with ceramic.