Poetic License

In the twenty-second floor Pomegranate Room—a gallery and retail space that gazes onto Lake Michigan and is flooded with deep, purple-red hues—jewelry designer and gemologist Ellie Thompson reads haikus aloud. Thompson has the graceful carriage of a dancer and the elocution of a poet, but when she reads an ancient poem about a little girl teaching a cat to dance, she lets out a deliciously girly laugh and nods her head appreciatively, as if to say “right on.” She lets the same contagious laugh fly when she tells me about excavations of the earth surrounding centuries-old Japanese cherry-blossom trees. There, scientists found remains of sake cups, evidence of the times when poets gathered under the trees, knocked back a few rounds and spurted out haikus. Thompson, who researched ancient Japan when dreaming up her latest collection, refers to the poems as “seventeen-syllable snapshots of nature. Haikus were really minimal, but they say so much more than what’s in those syllables.”

Thompson’s latest collection—called, simply, Haiku—reflects the kind of minimal, but vividly impressionistic, aesthetic that she admires in the work of ancient poets. Haiku glows with delicate floral shapes in white and rose gold, dainty pendants embedded with pink tourmaline and rings with brightly colored stones and hand-textured bands adorned with tiny, high-polished Japanese chrysanthemums. But the collection goes beyond pretty. “It’s not interesting for me to just make a flower,” Thompson says. “I want my work to have an interesting sense of proportion that becomes a kind of conceptual hook.”

Thompson’s less concerned with perfect balance than with nuanced, unexpected rhythm, so that when someone looks at her jewelry, “the eye doesn’t just go back and forth, like a tennis match.” In one piece from the Haiku collection—a double-flower pendant in white gold, studded with tiny diamonds and a five-millimeter aquamarine—the side-by-side flowers are two different sizes. Even in a pair of Ellie Thompson earrings, the two pieces are rarely mirror images of each other. Anything rote, expected or without room for imaginative interpretation is not something Thompson wants to talk about, and to her, wearing jewelry is very much like having a conversation: “When I make jewelry, I’m talking,” she says. “And when someone wears it, they’re listening, but also saying something—the jewelry is now speaking for them.” (Jennifer Berg)

Ellie Thompson, 8 South Michigan, Suite 2203, (312)263-2264, ellieco.com.