Hilde Janich

This is Hilde Janich

Hilde Janich, a German artist, transforms the ancient material of parchment into contemporary jewelry that unites fragility and strength. Since 1992, her guiding principle — “delicate but sturdy” — has defined a singular body of work where the ethereal meets the enduring.

At first glance, her necklaces appear almost weightless, like fine drawings suspended in air. Yet they are remarkably resilient — designed to be worn, touched, and lived with — resistant to stretching, pressure, and light.

Janich works with parchment and its finer variant, vellum, materials historically used to preserve illuminated manuscripts and sacred texts. Each parchment element is hand-dyed with non-water-soluble pigments, meticulously connected with tear-resistant nylon threads, and often accented with cultured freshwater pearls that lend a quiet rhythm to the composition.

Her jewelry is both technical and poetic: precise constructions that seem to breathe, revealing the translucency, memory, and quiet tension of the material itself. Through minimal gestures and profound sensitivity to the organic, Janich transforms parchment — once a vessel for words — into an architecture for the body, where endurance, light, and time coexist in delicate harmony.