About the Artist: Ayala Bar
For Israeli artist Ayala Bar, designing jewelry is an act of creative matchmaking. Inspired by the materials themselves—beads, crystals, fabric, metal—she is forever testing combinations and contrasts until suddenly the mash-up of colors, textures, and shapes comes together as a harmonious addition to your jewelry collection.
“Combining beads with soft tassels, matte textures with shiny metals… I was actually selling miniature artifacts,” Bar says of her earliest designs from the 1980s. Her grandmother, who emigrated to Israel from Afghanistan in the 1920s, remains a strong source of inspiration.
In the 1990s Bar traveled to India to look for beads and instead fell in love with silks and printed textiles. She sometimes incorporates fabric fragments into her jewelry collages; at other times she uses digital reproductions of the patterns that allow for even more design possibilities.
Always curious and willing to experiment, Ayala Bar has developed a style that is at once recognizable to collectors, and yet never static.
