Gerda Flöckinger CBE

b. Austria, 1927; maintains a studio in England

There is a variety and richness to the elegant jewelry of Gerda Flockinger. The artist explores a myriad of her own special techniques of fusing and twisting fine strands of gold and silver with brilliant execution. Precious molten metals are textured and embellished with sparkling diamonds, semiprecious stones and gold granules.

A pioneer in every right, Flockinger reinvented the fusion technique on an elaborate and sophisticated level in the 1950’s. Her experimental course at the Hornsey College of Art in London in 1962 marked a watershed in the regeneration of British jewelry design with its groundbreaking focus on the interplay between design and technique; an approach that fundamentally influenced the subsequent direction of jewelry in England. After establishing the jewelry program at Hornsey, she taught metals at the school from 1962 and 1968, as she would have liked to have been taught herself, for when she attended university at Central College, there were not yet jewelry courses available. Gerda worked as a jeweler for 17 years before she was offered a show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1971, where she became the was the first woman to do so.