Zoé Mohm does not recall when she began learning how to weave and whittle and make jewelry.
“I always did it,” she said during an interview last month at her apartment-atelier in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris. “I started early, as a child,” using whatever tools and materials were around her family’s home in the French capital and her paternal grandfather’s workshop in Burgundy.
But Ms. Mohm, 27, does recall learning to recognize the “really buttery color” of high-karat gold. “It glows — I love that glow,” she said. “Silver glows, too. Noticing that glow, noticing and wanting to make pretty things, especially jewelry, was always something like an instinct.”
Most of her jewelry-making skills are self-taught, although she holds a master’s degree in textile design from École Duperré, a public college of art and design in Paris, and she learned to solder while studying accessory design at La Cambre, a visual arts school in Brussels.
Ms. Mohm has been making jewelry full time since 2020, something she had not expected to do so soon after finishing her studies. But, she said, “I was selling so many pieces that I didn’t have the time to do anything else.”
The inspirations for Ms. Mohm’s designs vary widely, including the fact that her father is from Burgundy, in east central France, and her mother is from Cambodia — although she added that she “avoids exoticism.”
She has, however, begun to deliver pieces in small bags made of plaid krama, a traditional Cambodian textile, and at times has created designs reflecting both of her heritages. As an example, she modeled a belt woven of brass wire, its hammered grapevine design referencing Burgundy’s viniculture as well as Cambodia’s seven-head serpent deity, called naga. “That’s why all the grapes have faces,” she explained. (1,500 euros, or $1,540)
Her design’s recurring motifs include eyes, hands, shells, stars, moons, birds, fish, flowers, leaves, weaves, and a girl with pigtails and round cheeks of peach sapphires.
She also has studied the simplified storytelling devices of the early medieval period as well as her father’s collection of vintage X-Men comic books. “Tapestries and speech bubbles are really good at showing you where to look, and I like to indicate where you should look,” she said.
“I think of my brooches a bit like comic books,” Ms. Mohm added. As an example, she held up a three-inch-wide openwork silver brooch: On it, she had carved a full moon taking a sidelong glance at an open, lushly lashed eye to its left. The eye, in turn, was looking at a bird in flight to its left — and a kinetic star charm swung above the whole scene (€500).
Her pieces often involve such moving elements: loose chains, balls of silver or bronze, small dangling blossoms. Tassels, for example, are featured on her ropelike silver scarves (€3,500). “I mostly weave them on the Métro, like how people knit,” she said.
As for materials, Ms. Mohm works chiefly in sterling silver — it’s “neutral and easy to use for the starting point of a story, like a white blank page” — as well as with bronze, brass and gold. “I really like metal and like working with it directly,” she said. “If it breaks, you can solder it again. It’s a discussion and metals will forgive you.”
She also incorporates raw materials that she finds during hikes, and sometimes clients and friends also give her things, such as bones. Her boyfriend recently presented her with some alluvial garnets, found on beaches and in riverbeds, that he had picked up on the shoreline in Brittany.
Recent creations with such found materials have included a pinkie ring fashioned from polished deer antler and inlaid with honey-yellow and peach sapphires (€350); a hairpin carved from boxwood that she found in the forest near her paternal grandparents’ house (€250); and a silver ring set with a pale green heliodor, a diamond and a seed that she found last summer near a Cambodian temple ruin (€1,200).
Her creations — earrings, headdresses, cuffs, chokers, brooches, belts and more — are made with a variety of techniques, including hammering, casting, carving, beading and weaving. Her workspace reflects this diversity: brass wire and basketry tools hang from the walls; shelves hold finished works and raw treasures; and in a corner, a workstation is piled with wax and hammers.
“Her mind and hand want to touch almost every material, it seems!” said Sarah Burns, the co-owner of Old Jewelry, a boutique in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood that specializes in silver jewelry and has showcased Ms. Mohm’s work since last spring. “Her methods inform one another and inform her silver smithing in a bizarre way.” (This spring the boutique is planning to introduce a program called Open Editions, to include a selection of earrings it will produce from Ms. Mohm’s designs.)
Most of Ms. Mohm’s work is custom-made, but limited drops sometimes are offered by the online art and fashion boutique APOC, and she creates exclusive pieces for the Parisian clothing line Cristaseya.
She also crafts objects such as decorated corks, dishes, napkin rings and spoons for L’Oeil de KO, a gallery curated by the Parisian architecture firm Studio KO.
Nathalie Guihaumé, the gallery’s artistic director and a private client of Ms. Mohm’s, recently gave her a vintage Indian nose ornament with a gray pearl that Ms. Mohm deconstructed to create a necklace, and a bag of bones from a fishmonger in Senegal, one of which became part of a silver brooch.
“She is one of my very favorites,” Ms. Guihaumé said. “I would love to have a lot more of her work,” both personally and for the gallery.
With an eye to the future, Ms. Mohm has been looking for a workshop space, where she hopes she would allow her to hire some help. “I really want to stick to the custom jewelry orders, but balanced with the art pieces that I also want to do for, like, Nathalie’s gallery,” she said.
