Solar Jiao is a multidisciplinary designer whose work spans urban placemaking, cultural programming, and contemporary jewellery—driven by a desire to build connections between people and places.

Trained in landscape architecture at the University of Sheffield, she has worked across China, the UK, and Canada. In Shanghai, she helped envision a culturally rich future for the aging Shunchang Road neighbourhood through an urban curatorial project; in Shenzhen, she served as curatorial assistant for the 2020 Qianhai Future Urbanism/Architecture Exhibition (a sub-venue of the 8th UABB), contributing to the archival research and exhibition of the legendary British architectural group Archigram.

Since relocating to Toronto in 2023, Jiao has focused on public interventions that bridge cultural distance. She founded Urbannoodling, launching On the Move—a screening series of Chinese independent films exploring global migration—and created Balloon Grove, a Park(ing) Day Toronto installation that received national media attention for reimagining the use of public space.

In 2024, she launched nood, a contemporary jewellery label that treats jewellery as wearable sculpture: intimate, fluid forms—gestures caught in motion, carrying the quiet pulse of the spaces we move through.

Solar Jiao works between disciplines, from the urban scale of placemaking to the intimacy of wearable sculpture. Trained in landscape architecture with a Master’s degree from the University of Sheffield, her work has always pursued connections more than aesthetics only.

In 2024 she founded nood in Canada, a contemporary jewellery label that treats jewellery not as ornament but as extension—a living, unsettled medium in dialogue with body, space, and motion. Her debut collection, Continuity, takes the line as its point of departure, testing how this most elemental form can be bent, repeated, and set into motion to explore jewellery as an extension of the body.

Jiao embraces the freedoms of technology. She pursues forms beyond the reach of handwork—lines that catch the trace of movement, surfaces arrested mid-flow, spatial turns that hold both dynamism and clarity. Each piece moves from code to casting, realised in brass and finished with rhodium—one of the rarest metals, deliberately chosen for its reflectivity and permanence. Its lustre sharpens the tension within her forms, carrying the work beyond ornament toward a presence made to endure.

Between algorithm and hand, precision and touch, her pieces are pauses in movement—objects that register the body, and the world the body moves through.