Riham Hamed

"I make jewelry because I believe a woman deserves to carry something beautiful that is entirely hers."

Paris, Before Cairo

I grew up in the 7th arrondissement, the daughter of Egyptian parents who had come to Paris for graduate school and decided, quietly, to stay. Our apartment smelled of cardamom and old books. My father played Abdel Halim Hafez on Sunday mornings. My mother wore the same three gold pieces every day — a chain, a ring, a pair of small hoops — with the consistency of someone who had made a decision once and found it correct.

Paris taught me restraint. The French have a word for it — sobriété — that means something more deliberate than mere simplicity. It is the choice to remove rather than add. I learned it from the city's architecture, from the way my teachers dressed, from the way gold was worn: as a whisper, not a statement.

The Return

I returned to Cairo at thirty-two. A marriage, then a daughter, then the strange vertigo of becoming someone's mother in a city you know but do not quite recognise yet. Cairo gives you gold differently than Paris. Here it is worn to remember — a grandmother's bangle on a wrist, a name-plate necklace for a child who cannot read it yet.

I found myself buying materials from Khan el-Khalili before I had any clear plan. Copper wire. Obsidian beads. A small mandrel from a hardware shop in Heliopolis. I was not thinking about a business. I was thinking about my hands needing something to do that was not a screen.

The First Piece

The first piece I made was a sibha — ninety-nine beads of unpolished obsidian, strung on silk thread, with a copper tassel. I made it for my mother-in-law, who had been asking for one for years and could never find the right weight. She wept when she opened it. Not because it was extraordinary — it was not, not yet — but because it was exactly right.

That feeling — of a piece landing exactly where it belongs — became the only standard I have ever applied to the work. Is it exactly right?

The House

Chez Rémi — the name is my daughter's nickname for home. She calls every place we sleep "chez Rémi," which means, roughly, "at Rémi's place," Rémi being a figure she invented at four years old who exists somewhere between imaginary friend and domestic spirit.

I liked the idea of a house that was not quite located anywhere. Paris and Cairo both. A place you carry with you. That is what I hope a piece from here becomes — something you carry, and that carries something of you back.