Lotus Enamel Earrings

Along the banks of the Nile, flowers rose from the water with the morning light.

Among them was the lotus — a plant that would become one of the most recognisable images of ancient Egypt.

Its distinctive blossoms appear repeatedly across Egyptian visual culture. They were painted across tomb walls, incorporated into jewellery and vessels, carried in scenes of feasting and transformed into decorative forms that survived for thousands of years.

The flower's natural behaviour made it particularly evocative.

Emerging from the water and opening towards the daylight, the lotus offered the ancient Egyptians a powerful visual expression of renewal, regeneration and the returning cycle of life.

Colour made these images even more striking.

Egyptian craftspeople filled their world with brilliant blues, turquoise, green and gold. Glazed materials such as faience allowed intense blue-green colour to appear across beads, amulets, vessels and architectural decoration.

The Lotus Enamel Earrings draw these two traditions together.

Their sweeping outer petals recreate the instantly recognisable silhouette of a stylised Egyptian lotus, while lines of polished gold divide areas of deep turquoise ceramic enamel.

Rather than reproducing a single surviving jewel, Shinar takes an image repeated throughout thousands of years of Egyptian visual culture and transforms it into something contemporary.

A flower once painted beside the Nile becomes a jewel that can be worn today.

From the waters of the Nile, the lotus blooms again.