Staff Spotlight: Joanna Campbell

Joanna Campbell is an award-winning jeweller and has been making jewellery since graduating with a Bachelor of Design, in 3-Dimensional (jewellery major) from Unitec in 2001. In 2002 she won the Dowse Thomas Foundation Gold Award, a major award for New Zealand contemporary jewellers.

Her work is held in public and private collections nationally and internationally, including The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, The Auckland War Memorial Museum and The Art Gallery of South Australia.

Joanna is a creator and skilled maker of on-screen jewellery and artifacts in the demanding environment of movies and television, most recently Amazon’s Lord of the Rings. She was also the principal jeweller for Cowboy Bebop, a Netflix production, designing and making various wearable objects that helped define and establish the character looks of the main actors in the show. Other projects include working with Oscar-winning costume designer Ngila Dickson, making the armour, helmets and detailed components for the five leads in Tim Cruise’s The Last Samurai. She was the principal jeweller working for MTV, designing and making jewellery, ear tips, masks and helmets for the MTV produced mini-series Shannara. For a decade Joanna sold her jewellery collections into renowned fashion house Zambesi in New Zealand and Australia.

Joanna has taught master-class workshops and jewellery design and techniques at various institutions throughout the country such as MIT, Unitec, Whitireia and Hungry Creek, and is currently a tutor at Whitecliffe. She has been invited to participate in specialist workshops and exhibitions in Australia, such as the International Mokume Gane Symposium and Exhibition led by Dr Ian Ferguson.

Joanna has exhibited and sold her work through galleries in New Zealand, Australia, UK and Saudi Arabia. Her jewellery has been featured in Italian Vogue, The Times newspaper, and Habitus magazine. Her work has been noted by Paris-based fashion blogger Diane Pernet, critic and founder of ASVOFF (International Fashion Film Festival).

About Joanna's work

Joanna's varied collections range from wearable production pieces to more complex exhibition works. Her jewellery is based on a love of design combined with an innovative craft-based practice.

Underpinning her work is a fascination with textiles, and an enthusiasm for making metal more fabric-like in all its iterations: the study of the drape of a grosgrain ribbon; the ability of anodised aluminium to absorb dye like silk; or making strings of sequins out of gold and silver. Joanna has an extensive collection of rare antique lace from all over the world, which she incorporates directly into her jewellery, or uses to emboss the surface of the metal, conserving the imprint of the textile in a more permanent material. Creating a fossil like record of the character of a particular lace.

Mainly working with hallmarked sterling silver, 18 and 22 carat gold, she explores the colour possibilities of these materials by oxidizing silver and adding high carat gold to a base of sterling silver. Copper and copper alloys — Shakudo and Shibuichi — are also combined with gold and silver to create interesting colour combinations. Mokume Gane is an ancient Japanese metalworking technique that Joanna has always been interested in experimenting with. Creating innovative opportunities for exploring decorative pattern in her work, she produced the Mokume Gane Rosettes series in 2002. In a further investigation of colour, Joanna is currently experimenting with anodised and dyed aluminium.

See more of Joanna's work here