KYRA ZIMIN XU

Cluster Contemporary Jewellery
”AMALGAM”

Kyra Xu is a London-based jewellery designer and recent graduate of the BA Jewellery Design programme at Central Saint Martins. She creates dramatic pieces that transform the body and challenge conventional ideas of adornment.

Rooted in science fiction and imagined forms of life, her work explores how jewellery can alter the wearer’s appearance, building characters and visual identities that blur the boundary between the human and the otherworldly.

Designed for editorial and runway contexts, her pieces are built to command attention. She asks not just how we adorn ourselves, but what we might become.

What do you think aliens would look like if they actually existed?

I have always been fascinated by extraterrestrial life, but I find the creatures already living on Earth just as strange. Insects, with their unfamiliar anatomy, reflective surfaces and extreme forms, often look more alien to me than the aliens imagined in science fiction.

My practice uses jewellery and wearable sculpture to bring these imagined creatures onto the human body. In Metamorphosis, I imagined an extraterrestrial parasite attaching itself to a human host and gradually transforming the body into a human–insect hybrid. Each piece takes inspiration from a different insect structure, from wasp mandibles and beetle carapaces to mantis heads.

I work with 3D printing in resin and PLA plastic, electroplating and transparent, colour-shifting materials to create forms that feel biological but unfamiliar. I am particularly interested in how these materials react to light and change as the body moves.

For me, jewellery does not have to simply decorate the body. I like using it to alter the body itself, creating new silhouettes, characters and creatures that sit somewhere between jewellery and wearable sculpture.