Sailor Peng In The Lobby

Our colleague Laura from the bar can serve a Michelberger Sour or a slice of Chocolate Mousse Cake like the best of them. But she has other talents too. She’s the designer and producer of the jewellery which currently sits in the old green vending machine in our lobby.

Her jewellery line is called Sailor Peng. Turns out, Sailor Peng is Laura’s alter ego. “I’ve been an internet junkie forever, but I always felt I was sailing, not surfing through the web”. Peng comes from penguin, as she says there was a moment in her life when she was in love with these little flightless birds, and she got a nickname reflecting this. On consideration, Laura says that everything she does comes from a moment, a tiny thought.

Laura uses silver to make rings and bracelets in geometric shapes. They are recognisable forms – squares, triangles, and spheres. But don’t call her work minimalistic. “I hate this word. Just because it looks simple, doesn’t mean it is simple”. Right back to childhood, she’s been a creator of things. It was on one of her voyages through the internet where she first came across fine art jewellery. Pieces that are like a little sculptures you can wear. Laura finds the topic of this art form endlessly fascinating, and this is what inspired her to get out and make her own stuff.

Instead of going to school to learn the technical particulars of her craft, Laura instead completed a six-month internship with an established jeweller – a gent who made commercial men’s pieces. A completely different style from what Laura was interested in, but still, she learnt the skills she needed. And through this, she discovered that she wanted to create not just fine art jewellery, but pieces that people could wear every day… Pieces that people would love to wear every day.

She’s in her studio – a workshop collective she shares with another jeweller, two sculptors, a rebel artist called Ingo and a man who repairs bicycles – around three days a week. But her work is always on her mind, and she says that every day she is thinking about what the next collection will be. This is even surprising for Laura, who was working in Human Resources a few years ago and considering studying product design. The technical side of that industry put her off though, and she realised that what she wanted was to work with materials and objects. “I’m addicted to working with physical things. It’s like meditation. I’m in absolute peace when I’m in my workshop”.

See more of Laura’s work on her website or have a look at it in real life at the hotel.