One might assume that Emily Frances Barrett, known for elevating everyday detritus into wearable art, perceives beauty in all things. This is not the case, as I discover when visiting her studio in east London. ‘I don’t pick up any old bottle top,’ she quips, presenting me with a recent acquisition, a crushed blue cap adorned with a scratched-up star. ‘It has to be extra sexy.’
Cigarette butts, whose crumpled forms she collects on bike rides around the capital, are another favourite, as are the clay pipes she pockets while mudlarking on the Thames and elsewhere. Dipped in resin and turned into punky, industrial-looking earrings, pendants and brooches, the resulting bijouterie makes clear the critical role this city plays in shaping her practice.
‘I love some of the areas I end up going through to get to the river. All the [street] names and the cobbled pavements, they’re so evocative of barrow boys and ye olde London,’ says Frances Barrett warmly. ‘It leaves so much room for the imagination.’
Hackney’s counter-cultural history is another big influence. She was introduced to mudlarking by Dave Baby, a former member of the experimental craft collective the House of Beauty and Culture (Hobac). ‘That was a shop in Dalston founded by John Moore, a shoemaker. It was this group of very creative people: they were selling their designs in their store and it was all kind of ramshackle, but in the most beautiful way,’ says Frances Barrett. ‘I’m very inspired by some of those artists.’
Hobac’s store/studio was located just a stone’s throw away from Frances Barrett’s workshop in Haggerston, and she strikes me as a spiritual heir to the collective’s DIY design philosophy. Unsurprisingly, she has been likened to founding member Judy Blame, the avant-garde stylist who similarly repurposed Thames treasure for his era-defining jewellery. Frances Barrett met Blame a few times before his death in 2018 and describes him as ‘intense’.
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Her workshop, stationed in a former furniture factory, is a lesson in controlled clutter. The walls are white and mostly unadorned. Meanwhile, plastic crates have been shoved on to a narrow mezzanine, installed by Frances Barrett to make the most of the high ceilings. ‘People assume that I’ll have loads of stuff stuck up on the walls,’ she explains. ‘I actively don’t, because I’m very stimulated by things. I have to curate them, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get anything done.’ Rather than a chaotic explosion of paraphernalia, her workbench and windowsill offer a lovingly stocked tuckshop of inspiration (albeit one that’s heavily laden). Like the cigarette butts from her cycles, the items that reside there are often absorbed into her work.
Frances Barrett picks up a silver cockleshell-shaped ring box, purchased in an antique shop in Corsica more than a decade ago. It has travelled from studio to studio with her ever since. Then she tells me about six baby tortoises she hatched during lockdown. She made a mould from the carapace of one of them using non-toxic putty, and cast it in silver. The result, which she places on a side table next to its Corsican predecessor, is her tortoise-shell treasure box. Similarly small and rotund, it’s designed to sit comfortably in the palm, and is weightier than the ring container. ‘I stared at that for years, thinking it was the most beautiful object; it subconsciously inspired the shape and function of the [treasure box],’ she confirms.
Elsewhere, a plate with a floral border reclines against the huge window at the front of Frances Barrett’s workshop. Cracked all over and stapled back together, it was brought here intentionally by her. ‘I know that this is informing something – something that will eventually be spat out in a bit of work.’
To my left sits a pile of ceramic shards that will be ‘spat out’ as bejewelled cups, saucers or vases. Frances Barrett’s vessels have gained far less attention than her jewellery, which has struck a major chord with the fashion set. It’s a shame: the former are chunky, tactile and beautiful, and still hint at Judy Blame’s baroque grit. After bringing her finds back from the river bank, Frances Barrett cleans them, then arranges them by shape, size and colour: ‘What’s next to a piece affects how you see it,’ she says. This aspect of her practice parallels a natural phenomenon. ‘On a certain spot on the foreshore you’ll get loads of bits of iron, all in the same place,’ she explains. ‘They’re of similar density; the Thames is moving materials of the same kind. It’s categorising things itself, just because of how the water moves’.
A version of this article also appears in the June 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
