After many years working in marketing and communications, Clare Maiden discovered her passion for jewellery making and working with metal, after randomly joining a local evening class. Her colleagues saw her work and commissioned her to make for them and soon she was running stalls and selling online. This led to selling the family home to fund a full-time return to university, studying at the Birmingham School of Jewellery, where she has graduated with a first-class honours degree.  Clare is now an independent jewellery designer and goldsmith based in southwest Cornwall. Since moving to Cornwall with its dramatic coast and rich heritage, Clare takes inspiration from the weather and sea as metaphors for life. Her work is centred around her clients, an approach ingrained from her earlier career as an art director. She creates versatile, highly wearable designs with understated elegance; fluid, sinuous forms, accented by contrasts in texture with subtle sparkle. In 2024 she won two GC&DC awards. Clare’s collections have been showcased in London, Paris and Vicenza.

In The Wave Collection, Clare Maiden captures the sense of being by the sea. That feeling on a sunny day walking along a beach with the calm sea looking like ripples of undulating silk as the waves gently roll in along the shore. An elemental sense of wellbeing when it feels like all’s well with the world.  Common to all the pieces within the Wave collection is a simple undulating form which rises up and over like the crest of a wave rolling in, building to its peak before it breaks. The curve of graduated diamonds is inspired by that point when at that very last moment, just before the rolling wave loses its energy and sinks into the sand, you catch a glimpse of a little arc of light along its leading edge, sometimes with the glisten of froth on top.