Polly Wales and Castro Smith unveil fantasy-inspired fine jewelry collection

Polly Wales and Castro Smith have made fantasy feel intimate rather than theatrical. Their 16-piece fine-jewellery collaboration turns snakes, butterflies, ants, scorpions and spiderwebs into a visual language of hidden worlds, using negative space, engraving and cast-not-set stones to make each jewel read like a private emblem.

The project grew over years of mutual admiration, with the two jewelers passing pieces back and forth across oceans, workshops, sketches and voice notes until instinct and trust shaped the final work. The launch unfolded across June 4 and June 5 with a digital preview at 6pm GMT, an in-person preview party at PWFJHQ in Los Angeles on June 4 from 5pm to 9pm PT, a pop-up at 5023 N. Figueroa Street from June 4 to 5, 11am to 5pm PT, and a digital release on June 5 at 6pm GMT.

Wales’s cast-not-set technique gives the collection its core tension. Stones are allowed to find their place in molten metal during casting, then Smith’s hand engraving turns those surfaces into caves, webs and tiny habitats for creatures that seem to have colonized the gold. Wales has traced that sensibility back to the United Kingdom in the 1990s, when counter-culture and the rave scene helped shape her taste for work that feels experimental, fluid and slightly subversive.

That language shows up most clearly in pieces such as The Gatherers Rainbow Sprinkle Ring, where intergalactic fire ants collect treasure among rainbow sapphires, and The Crawler Rainbow Clusterf@&$ Signet Ring, where a scorpion rests among rainbow sapphire blossoms. Webs & Wings extends the same grammar of metamorphosis. The materials reinforce the idea: 18k recycled yellow gold, rainbow and purple-and-green sapphires, and surface treatments including red ceramic, white rhodium and lilac ceramic by Castro Smith give the collection color, contrast and texture without losing the rugged immediacy of the cast forms.

Some pieces are offered as editions of 50, and the collection also includes a limited-edition archival pigment print, 70 cm by 20 cm, on museum etching paper with Prismacolor pencils. That extra object matters because it widens the work from adornment into archive, reinforcing the sense that these are not just decorative things but carried stories. In a market where buyers increasingly want jewelry to function as talisman, signature and memory object all at once, Wales and Smith have made the case for symbolism with real craft behind it.