Hanan Sultan

Hanan Sultan is an Omani jewellery designer who is based between Muscat (Oman), Dubai (United Arab Emirates) and London (United Kingdom). She graduated with a BA in Jewellery Design from Central Saint Martins: University of the Arts London, and has participated in student collaborative projects with the British Art Medal Society, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Swarovski and Vitsœ. Hanan is passionate about both fine arts and fashion and finds that jewellery is the perfect middle ground between the two. She is a multilayered thinker. Her art and design practices are predominantly centred around cultural identity and the human experience of society in relation to this. She incorporates both traditional and contemporary materials and methods of designing and making jewellery.

Press Release:

Hanan’s practice in Jewellery Design is a blur between fine arts and fashion; including the exploration of cultural identity in relation to the human experience of society. As a neo-traditionalist, her work is a bricolage of her research in the following themes: histories and luxuries of hair; materiality and immateriality; heirlooms; luxury and commerciality.

She was inspired to incorporate rubies as found in her personal familial heirlooms, making new heirlooms that allude to her obsessions with luxury and hair adornment. Her processes include epistolary creative writing, collaboration, traditional and contemporary ways of designing, between the analogue and technology, traditional jewellery techniques and contemporary ones that require the use of technologies like CAD and CAM.

Artist Statement:

Hanan says: ‘I always say that I do not fully conform to any society/culture, rather I am a human of the globe, I belong to a neo-traditional culture, a manifestation of newness; an evolution. It is a culture taken from multiple different cultures and experiences, things that mean something to me and are relevant to my lifestyle; a bricolage of my cultural identity and places I spend my time in. I looked at heirlooms, how we can learn from and through them; uncover new meanings, what they tell us about our ancestors, the emotions they evoke, their materiality and immateriality. I then took what was evocative to me and added other meaningful elements that I could leave for my future descendants.

I am obsessed with hair! I believe that it is an extension of one’s body. If humans in different cultures and civilizations throughout history have decorated their body parts with adornments made out of precious metals and stones, I ask why it is not common to adorn our potency with preciousness in our modern contemporary lives? People in the twenty-first century have made this a plastic-fanatic, mass produced world where hair adornments have become non-precious, disposable and easily replaceable. This approach negates the idea of preserving something for the future generations.’