Completedworks has been busy this year. In January, the cult accessories (and now homeware) brand converted an old London boozer into a gleaming brutalist showroom and studio, which captured headlines for its brilliant and flexible design. The following month, the brand invited audiences to a dinner party installation at London Fashion Week and collaborated with chic British fashion brand TOVE on a jewellery collection, which saw oversized gilded flowers and strings of pearls bloom as earrings.
Later in August, it was announced that Completedworks would be turning its hand to bags. While more recently, alongside presenting another well-received collection on the London Fashion Week schedule, Completedworks’ jewels adorned the models on the buzzy FEBEN Spring/Summer 2024 runway. Despite this year marking the brand’s 10th anniversary in an increasingly tough climate for independents, it seems for Completedworks there is no slowing down in sight.
Over the past decade, the self-taught founder of the brand Anna Jewsbury has been slowly but steadily accruing a following of Completedworks devotees with her sculptural and often purposefully indelicate pieces, accented with warped metals, bulbous pearls and chunky irregular resin shapes. And it is perhaps her unconventional approach to inspiration and design that has led to success. Anna studied maths and philosophy at Oxford University, her background far from typical of those entering the accessories and homeware realm.
“People always think my route is a really unusual one. But I feel like there's a lot of room for creativity in maths and philosophy too,” says Anna. “It's almost like you're trying to find ways to understand the world through those subjects. I’m driven by this feeling of wanting to create something new – a new visual language.” Since 2013, jewellery has become the perfect medium for Anna to experiment with this idea “because of its small and intimate scale,” she says.
Her work beautifully toys with the tension between opposites. Hard and soft, natural and man-made, surreal and everyday, traditional and contemporary, Anna playfully balances the dichotomies that define the modern world. “I love this idea of taking something very classically formed, but then really messing with it to create some sort of subversion. I like making things a little bit strange,” she says. Her previous works have referenced scrunched-up, abandoned legal strategies that take form as gold jewellery and fluid, sculpted coffee mugs that borrow from the drapery of Renaissance paintings.
Most recently, the 1980s comedy Honey, I Shrunk The Kids was the starting point for Completedworks’ moody Spring/Summer 2024 collection. Set in a dimly lit room with a mirrored pond in its centre, Anna found the collection’s creative spark in the film’s surreal set designs. “In the new collection, I feel like there's imperfection in the pieces, which I really love,” she says, “there's these uncanny representations of flowers and petals, that celebrate the wonder of the imperfect.”
Taking inspiration from the colossal fauna props that loom over the actors in the film, Anna recreated her own other-worldly landscape to present her latest collection of jewels, homeware and newly launched handbags.
As of this week, the handbag collection is at last available to purchase. From bow and bead-emblazoned crossbodies that borrow from the brand's pearly accessories to a pair of slouchy leather clutch bags fitted with sculptural, resin handles (one in signature mint green) that harken back to its homewares, this new venture gives us yet another reason to invest in Completedworks.
By Augustine Hammond
Discover more at completedworks.com and shop these completed works to own a bit of Anna’s magic:
