Tricia Gordon-Johnston
Tricia's Handmade - The Weight of Silver
Where the Air Is Different
I grew up way up in Red Hills, Woodland Heights, where the air is different; cooler, quieter, and from the right spot you can see the city spread out below you like something you dreamed. I didn’t grow up thinking about jewellery or brands or what it meant to build something. I grew up thinking about art. That was the calling, the one thing that made sense to me before anything else did.
I studied painting at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. I want to be clear about that, because I think it matters: I am not a fashion designer. I am an artist. The jewelry, the ceramics, the paintings, the digital work, it all flows from the same source. The same hand. The same eye that was trained to look at the world and find the shape of something true inside it.
So when people ask me where it all began, I don’t point to a runway or a trend. I point to a life spent collecting. For decades, I had been gathering sterling silver jewellery, piece by piece, each one chosen for something I couldn’t always name. There’s a particular kind of love that lives in collecting. You’re not just acquiring objects; you’re in conversation with them. You’re asking, what are you made of, and what does that make me?
The Melting Point
In 2014, I decided to stop collecting and start creating. I melted down my pieces. Just like that. Years of gathered silver, gone back to liquid, gone back to possibility. I drew them into wires of different gauges and made my first collection with my own hands. It was not a business decision. It was something closer to a reckoning.
There is a particular kind of silence in the studio when everything is going right. Music is playing, always music, and it creates a rhythm underneath the work, a pulse that keeps you present. I begin by looking at what I have already made. I study the forms, the textures, the decisions I made before this moment. Past work is not finished work; it’s a conversation you’re still in the middle of. Something in an older piece will catch the light differently than it did the first time, and suddenly I know where to go next.
Then I go into the materials. Clay, metal, whatever is waiting. There’s a dialogue that happens between your hands and what you’re working with, and the best days are the ones when the material surprises you, when a piece becomes something you didn’t plan for, something that exceeds your intention. By the end of those days I am tired in my bones, but there is a satisfaction underneath the tiredness that feels like proof of something. Proof that the work is real.
Leaning Further In
I won’t pretend it has always been easy to hold onto that feeling.
The hardest thing about building a premium brand when you are an artist is that the world wants you to move faster than your integrity can travel. Trends shift. Markets shift. And there are moments when you wonder whether staying true to your vision is an act of commitment or just stubbornness dressed up in principle.
I chose to lean further in. Further into the Caribbean perspective, the handcrafted detail, the story sewn into every piece. I chose patience, not the passive kind, but the active kind that requires you to keep showing up, keep refining, keep educating people about what they’re actually holding when they hold your work. Slowly, what I thought might limit me became the thing that set me apart. Authenticity is not a marketing strategy. But it does, eventually, find its people.
Designing for Kindred Spirits
I design for myself first. I know how that sounds, but I mean it plainly: if I wouldn’t wear it or live with it, I cannot fully invest in making it. That honesty is the foundation. From there, the pieces seem to find their way to kindred spirits, people who are confident enough to wear something with a story in it, people who have decided that what they put on their body should mean something.
Jamaica’s energy lives in my work whether I’m consciously reaching for it or not. The warmth, the movement, the way we carry sophistication and ease in the same body, that is woven into every form I make. We are a people who have always taken our culture to the global stage without losing ourselves in the crossing. That is what I am trying to do, too.
Carrying the Island Across Oceans
When I think about someone in the Diaspora, someone who left the island years ago and has been carrying Jamaica inside them ever since, I want my work to feel like a touchstone. Not nostalgia, which can be a kind of grief, but recognition. A quiet yes, this is where I am from, and I still carry it. Identity doesn’t need a passport. It travels in what we choose to hold close.
Being part of the Things Jamaican family has meant being seen in that specific, essential way, as part of a larger story about what Jamaican creativity looks like when it’s given room to breathe. People have found me through that door and followed my work around the world. That kind of visibility changes things. It steadies you.
Begin Where You Are
Five years from now, I want the brand to hold everything it already is and more, the jewelry, the ceramics, the paintings, and perhaps the quiet revival of the minimalist linen clothing line that has been resting, not forgotten. I want the work to reach homes and wardrobes everywhere, but I want it to always be recognizably rooted here. In this soil. In this light.
To the young Jamaican designer who is afraid to start, I know that fear. I have felt it. But I want you to understand something: the work cannot find its people until you release it into the world. You don’t need perfect conditions or perfect confidence. You need to begin. Start with what you have. Start where you are. Your perspective is not a limitation; it is the whole point.
The silver had to be melted down before it became something new. That’s how it works.
