When I was a little girl, I spent my days dreaming, creating and wandering through the trees, collecting pocketsful of natural treasures to bring home and cherish. I felt so deeply connected to myself, to nature, to the world around me; and in that connection, I felt rooted and free at the same time.

From a very early age I was struck by a fascination with gold; having visited a goldsmith’s atelier during an excursion, I gave a presentation about it at school when I was as young as eleven. During my twenties I further pursued this passion at a trade school, where I was trained to be a goldsmith.

There, I learned to rein in my creativity and authenticity for the sake of doing things the way they were supposed to be done; the right way, the traditional way. I worked my hardest to fit into the mold, as if like liquid metal, I could be poured and bent into shape as well. But the thing about getting caught up in this idea of having to be perfect, about pushing yourself to crystallize into a foreign form, is that it often causes you to lose your sense of play—and with that, your sense of self.

Much like going astray from yourself, rediscovering yourself isn’t something that happens at once. It happens gradually; one by one, you encounter parts of yourself you thought you’d lost, sometimes in the most unexpected of places, and you start to piece yourself back together again. For me, that happened in Iceland, where I did my internship abroad; it felt like an invisible string was pulling me towards these parts which appeared both foreign and familiar somehow. Before even embarking on this journey, I could already sense that it would be transformative. And it ended up being exactly that.