Bridging the gap between art and fashion their sumptuous fantasy designs reflect the balance between the beautiful and the dark, the past and the future. Rejecting the dominant throw away culture Y&E create lasting pieces of sculptural art jewelry to be loved for life.

 

Heavily influnced by theatre, fantasy, and the inherent beauty of the inner beast, Y&E create signature sculptural collections that are at once mythological and futuristic. Classical fine features, subtle and luminous, are contrasted with raw and dark realities. Fragmented remains metamorphose into graceful hybrid beings.

 

Artist Yunus Ascott and Sculptor Eliza Higginbottom met in 2007 whilst casting precious metals in one of the last surviving specialist Foundries in London. Discovering they spoke a similar language they started collaborating and remain based in this same metal foundry.

 

They lead you up to the gates of an enchanted world of chaos, decadence, magic and splendor. Each piece can take you by the hand through openings, cracks and windows, and, to those who listen, whisper you its story…

All pieces are designed and created by Yunus and Eliza in London. The collections are entiely hand-made, ensuring that each piece is an equisite labor of love.

 

The Process

 

Drawing on a foundation of fine art, classical sculpture and restoration, after hand-sculpting each piece, they employ the ancient lost wax process and centrifugal casting methods. These traditional techniques, developed through experience, ensure a striking level of detail and idiosyncrasy

Due to nature of this process each piece is unique. In addition we actively make changes in each, as we find that each creation has its own life and we follow its particular choices.

We always start from a place of ideas, stories, and experiments, classical imagery, nature, dreams, surreal and archaic memory and desires, and unleash these into drawings and models in clay or wax, sculpted by hand from the imagination.

We make a mould of the individual elements that we like, employing a mixture of very old and very modern techniques. We sometimes use fragments of ancient sculptures that we have reworked and restored. We assemble the elements into a coherent whole. A young man may jump onto a rock and we know that this is where he belongs. We tell the tale of The Watcher as he settles himself there, we work with magnifying glasses and sculpt his world seamlessly around him.

We work the waxes until they are perfect, we tree them up, attaching wax runners and risers, place the sculptures in a steel flask and invest them, place them in the kiln and fire them, heat the metal and pour it in using a centrifuge, open the cans and carefully knock out the still warm investment plaster to reveal the raw metal sculpture.