You never know when inspiration might strike. Brooklyn-based jeweler Arianna Petrich had the idea for her most successful design while sitting in the waiting room for jury duty, while the rest emerged "while falling asleep—mostly about kinetics and different ways of connecting components," she explains.
There is an undeniably "kinetic" aspect to Petrich's jewelry line, "overdot": the leather and brass rope necklaces that became her hallmark are designe to shift and rearrange themselves over the course of the wearer's day. "My aesthetic leans toward clean pieces that reveal themselves in layers," says Petrich, who produces everything for her collections by hand in her apartment.
Appropriately, the customer she envisions is as mutli-faceted as her work. "They're for a person who sees things from multiple perspectives and likes the idea of wearing a small kinetic sculpture."
In addition to the image collection at the New York Public Library—"It's amazing what you can unintentionally unearth in those files," says Petrich—the designer draws much of her inspiration from years spent living in New Orleans.
"I lived there for seven years, [and became] fascinated by the city's textures, surfaces and layers," she explains. "New Orleans is built around a river which is always slightly changing its course both by nature and by man. Because of that, the city and the people must inherently be adaptable but always keep a strong undercurrent of history and tradition. My designs are based on this idea of open-endedness and adaptability." If only being adaptable always meant wearing one of Petrich's gorgeous designs.
View the complete collection www.dotoverdot.com.
