The transmutation of matter
Words by Jamie Crocker
Justin Duance turns small objects of desire into lasting heirlooms that hold emotion and tread lightly upon this world.
If you didn’t know it was there, you’d miss it. It’s a place that has a literal high-street presence but manages to hide itself behind heavy wooden double doors and a metal plaque that hints at what’s within. This is the home of Justin Duance, Contemporary Jewellery on Alverton Street, Penzance. One senses that the feeling of mystery it encourages is deliberate, the first step on a journey that has the trappings of ritual, exposition and reverence.
Once inside, a hall leads to a room housing crafters going about their business, various bottles of sand collected from Sennen Cove to Rocky Point, Hawaii, all neatly labelled and arranged on shelves, waiting to be uncorked so that their contents can become instrumental in the alchemic mixing that goes into the making. An old walk-in safe door rests stolidly open, revealing a secret place inherited from the building’s previous owners. Inside, a trove of shelves is carefully stacked with blocks of wood hewn from oak, elm, cedar and cherry, salvaged from old boats and the offcuts of local tree surgeons, the wood still faintly smelling of resin and the sea. It has the aura of a netherworld, a liminal space that connects somewhere ancient with the present, twenty-five years of raw material being collected, waiting to be called into the light.
Purpose-built in 1885 for a group of solicitors, Justin and his team have rescued the structure from Dickensian-esque decay, ripping out musty carpets revealing Victorian tiled floors, installing ground source heat pumps and solar panels that ‘the experts’ said wouldn’t heat a dolls-house, so that a bright and airy interior has emerged – a space that is both workshop and place to engage with clients.
It is a reward and staging point of a journey and passion that began many years ago. Justin started the business in 2001, straight out of a jewellery and silversmithing degree in London, at a point when his tutors had actively discouraged the wood inlay work he would later make part of his jewellery signature. The very first shop that agreed to stock his work wanted exactly what the university had waved off, something unlike anything else on the high street at the time. Type “wooden inlay ring” into a search engine now and page after page of imitators comes back. In the 2000s, it returned nothing, because as far as Justin can tell, nobody else was making them.
The sandcasting followed the same crooked road. Justin worked out how to pour molten precious metal straight into damp beach sand, so that the grain and grit of a particular Cornish cove would be captured forever in gold or silver, every ridge and pockmark of a place pressed into the metal like a fingerprint. It has since become something taught on courses across the country, a small ache of frustration that he shrugs off rather than begrudges, choosing instead to keep pushing the idea somewhere new, the way a tide keeps rearranging the same stretch of shore into something slightly different.
Raising these pieces above technical cleverness is the way a customer is invited into the making of them. Someone might bring in sand from the beach where they got engaged, or a scrap of driftwood picked up on a childhood holiday, and watch it become the substance of a ring worn every single day from then on. The wood in an inlaid ring darkens and softens over the years, taking on a driftwood grain of its own, while the surrounding metal collects the small dents and scuffs of an ordinary life, of doors opened and washing-up done and hands plunged into cold sea water. Nothing here is made to sit in a box for best. It is made to be lived with.
All the metal is recycled, and every gemstone is either lifted from an old piece of jewellery or bought new with its journey fully traced, from the mine through the cutter’s bench to the workshop door.
Old mine-cut diamonds, faceted by hand before the 1930s and often untraceable to any particular mine, are treated as the better ethical bet precisely because they are already above ground and circulating, needing only a new setting and not another hole dug in the earth. Catch one under a loupe, and it throws the light back differently from a modern brilliant cut, carrying a depth in its imperfection that a machine-cut stone, for all its sparkle, cannot quite manage.
The same care for what already exists shapes how Justin treats the people who work for him. In a stance that flies in the face of the dominant neo-liberal culture, he speaks refreshingly about wanting to give his staff a sense of sovereignty and security, in a world that does not traditionally bother with such things. The workshop moved to a four-day week once the exhaustion of the pandemic years had passed, a change made for the sake of the team’s wellbeing rather than the balance sheet, cushioned by a pay rise that made the shorter week close to a genuine trade rather than a sneaky pay cut. Several of the current team, including jeweller and social media manager, Jamila, who has worked alongside Justin for 12 years, arrived with no jewellery experience at all and learned the craft at the bench, moving between roles as their own creative instincts surfaced.
This year marks that quarter century, celebrated with an open day at the Penzance workshop and the launch of the Sea Foam Locket, a limited run of pieces cast in solid sterling silver and stamped with an edition number. Delicate yet sturdy enough for daily wear, the locket has a perforated shell through which small beach finds show themselves once dropped inside. Each one is sold with a plastic nurdle collected from Mounts Bay, a scrap of industrial pollution deliberately set alongside the sea glass and worn pebbles we are more used to prizing. Inspired by sea foam, the limited-edition locket draws attention to these tiny pieces of plastic, which can be mistaken for something natural and are readily eaten by wildlife. It asks what counts as treasure on a Cornish beach, while encouraging us to notice and remove what should not be there. Cast from recycled silver, just 25 have been made to mark the jeweller’s 25th anniversary, with 100% of profits going to Surfers Against Sewage through Work for Good. Eleven have already raised almost £2,500.
None of this would carry much weight without the stories customers bring in through that enigmatic portal, and it is there that the workshop earns its keep. A father’s old gold ring gets reworked into something his son can wear without flinching at its original garish design. A groom who swears blind he has no interest in rings walks out unable to stop turning his new one in the light. A diamond inherited from a mother, too painful to see glinting on a hand every day, is reset into a shape that holds the memory without holding the grief quite so tightly. Twenty-five years on, the real material this workshop has always worked in was never only sand, wood or salvaged gold. It has been the willingness to let a person’s own history shape the thing they walk away wearing, cast, quite literally, from the place and the people it belongs to.
