Exploring notions of Time, Craft and Design to approach jewellery.

Time need not be conceived as a constant forward movement fleeing an original past. I have come to perceive it instead as an expansion—curving, folding, unfolding, and even returning. A spiral, perhaps, rather than a line. From this way of seeing, making is not an isolated event occurring at a single point in time, but time itself emerging—one of its most tangible expressions. In craft, time becomes materially perceptible: folding and unfolding through repetition, gathering memory, transforming material, and recurring in objects that embody duration itself.

To make is to repeat gestures that predate us. Hands follow paths learned through observation, habit, and inheritance. These repetitions are not exact copies, but living recurrences—slight shifts shaped by circumstance, material, and need. In this way, craft holds together not only past, present, and possible near futures, but also our particular way of being in time. Without needing to invoke Heidegger explicitly, one can observe that in making we experience being itself. What is made—the object—becomes a receptacle of lived experience, carrying traces of thought, of hands, and of stories that continue to unfold when it is adopted and used. Objects emerge not as simple outputs, but as material traces of gestures, relations, and histories that exceed the moment of production.

Movement mediates our relation to both space and duration. Through repeated interaction with materials—cutting, binding, polishing, assembling—we shape the world and are shaped in return. Over time, certain gestures persist because they sustain us. Shared, these gestures become habits, knowledge, and eventually culture. What we call tradition is often nothing more—and nothing less—than repetition that has endured.

Such an understanding challenges dominant modern conceptions of time as linear, progressive, and future-oriented—models that have shaped industrial production and instrumentalised making as output. By contrast, craft foregrounds repetition (not to be confused with the cloning of forms for mass production) rather than novelty, continuity rather than rupture, and adaptation rather than obsolescence. Its temporal logic is cumulative and recursive: gestures are rehearsed, refined, and transmitted, sustaining forms of knowledge that are embodied rather than abstracted.

Yet not all repetitions are equally valued. Some ways of making have been pushed aside, rendered obsolete, or reduced to symbols of a frozen past. Other rhythms of time—linear, accelerated, extractive—have come to dominate, reshaping how we understand productivity, progress, and worth. Against this, craft continues to move at a different pace. It resists haste. It insists on duration. It remembers. Where it disappears, a way of being disappears with it.
Within a Western rationalised framework, craft has been consistently relegated to the margins—classified as pre-modern, inefficient, or residual. This marginalisation is not merely aesthetic or economic, but colonial and ontological. Craft is devalued when it operates according to systems of value that diverge from dominant norms, yet selectively celebrated when it can be instrumentalised to reinforce those same systems. If we understand made objects as material traces of lived time—woven from networks of relations, stories, and histories that exceed the moment of production—then we see how they function as powerful symbols of belonging and cultural identity. The French, for instance, are particularly adept at marketing and politicising notions of patrimoine and savoir-faire as the core of national identity—whether historically grounded or mythically constructed. Outside the aesthetic standards and symbolic systems that have long supported regimes of dominance, much embodied knowledge has been lost.

And with them, possible futures.

Indeed, if time is understood not as linear progression but as a cyclical or spiral process of recurrence, repetition in craft does not signify stasis. Rather, it constitutes a dynamic process through which continuity and transformation coexist. Philosophers have long grappled with time as lived experience rather than measurement: Bergson’s durée, Bachelard’s instants, Heidegger’s revealing, all point toward time as something felt, enacted, and disclosed through action. Alongside these reflections, African cosmologies articulated by Fu-Kiau Bunseki and John S. Mbiti offer understandings of time grounded in recurrence, ancestry, and event. Here, time does not advance toward an abstract future, but deepens through memory—returning again and again to what has already been lived.

Craft seems to belong naturally to this terrain. Its objects endure beyond their makers, carrying forward the marks of gesture and intention. They witness the continuity of being, even as they adapt and change.

As scholars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Achille Mbembe, and Arturo Escobar have shown, colonial power extended into epistemology by imposing Western notions of time, value, and productivity while delegitimising other ways of knowing and being. In this context, the displacement of craft must be understood as part of a broader erasure of cyclical, relational, and practice-based ontologies. To attend to craft, then, is to attend to another way of inhabiting time—one that does not seek to escape the past, but to remain in dialogue with it. This is not an act of nostalgia, but a form of epistemic resistance.
Moving alongside making, we are led to reflect on design as a way of thinking. Within our contemporary framework, design must move beyond its origins as a tool shaped by industrialisation and efficiency, and become a critical site for rethinking temporality, agency, and continuity in culture and craft. This requires situating the object not as an isolated outcome, but within the full cycle of its becoming—its materials, its making, its use, and its afterlife. It requires a shift away from the linear, disconnected temporality of modern life—always in flight.

This awareness is particularly resonant in jewellery, a field marked by profound paradoxes. Jewellery is inseparable from the body. It accompanies the gestures of daily life, shelters the body, and gives its movements meaning. As the object closest to the skin—after clothing—it marks perhaps the most intimate threshold between being and world. It functions as both ornament and language. It is purely cultural: time and being powerfully embodied. Violent and careless forms of material extraction coexist with the attribution of high value to materials that serve no other intrinsic function than ornamental. These materials are transformed into objects that act as vehicles of power, identity, gender, affiliation, or dissidence, often calibrated to the demands of a global market, dominated by Western values, and highly dependent on extractive industries. Some of the stones labelled “precious” hold little value beyond their circulation as cultural commodities, including the diamonds, very needed in many technologies, but that we can now reproduce without destroying our planet. In jewellery, one finds a clear manifestation of the modern erasure of ontological and epistemic diversity. As well as the absurd violence hidden behind modern and capitalistic implication for our being in the world.

It is therefore striking how often jewellery seeks to distance itself from the body, aspiring instead to become “art” or “wearable art” in order to retain value and meaning, particularly when working with materials that fall outside established market hierarchies. Yet it is craft—with its functional grounding—rather than art, that holds the deepest truth of being. Art may give form to thought, but craft gathers thought and body together within time. And in thinking through design, jewellery can offer a space to articulate new values and to affirm a plurality of ways of being present in time. Design to penetrate the market and influence it for change.
 

About the author

Makila Nsika is a London-based jewellery designer whose work is informed by the artistic traditions of the Republic of Congo. She holds a Master’s degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne and an MA in Design from Central Saint Martins, both awarded with distinction. Working at the intersection of storytelling, material innovation, and contemporary luxury, Makila founded M.Kala to explore alternative narratives of value and sustainability. Her debut collection was selected for the SHINE programme at the Goldsmiths’ Centre in 2021. In 2024, her research-led work with palm nut material received major recognition, including the CSM Graduate Award and the LVMH-supported MAISON/0 Award for Sustainability. In 2025, she was awarded the Rising Star Award by New Ashgate Gallery and the Bright New Gems Award for Sustainability. Through M.Kala, Makila positions palm nut as a luxury material, bridging traditional knowledge with contemporary design and sustainability discourse.

Website: https://www.mkala.co.uk/
Instagram: @m.kala_jewellery
E-mail: mknsika@gmail.com