Meet Jewellery Designer Michelle Ross

With a nod to her training in fashion and textiles, jewellery designer Michelle Ross fuses semi-precious stones and metals with glass, ceramics and vintage finds to create her collection of bold, tactile contemporary jewellery.

Michelle’s studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the UK’s prestigious London College of Fashion honed her innate eye for detail and keen sense of style.

Since September, Michelle has been busy in her Artscape Distillery studio building her inventory of unique limited-edition pieces for three major holiday shows including Toronto’s epic One of a Kind Show, which starts on November 22. The past few seasons she has been working to create hand-formed brass pieces, making brass, which is so rigid in nature, more fluid.

Michelle is looking forward to the opening of Artscape Daniels Launchpad and accessing the resources that will be available in its Creative Studios.

“I’m not a traditional jeweler, so I don’t have a lot of the traditional jewellery equipment in my studio, I use more industrial processes,” says Michelle. When she needs traditional jewellery equipment, which is often, she works with a technician or rents the tools as she needs them for a project. “Launchpad will just make it easier to experiment and allow me to be more creative while trying out new techniques, and I think having access to the technician’s expertise will be a huge benefit to my practice.”

“I’m quite passionate about arts advocacy and anything that will bring the arts to a larger community,” says Michelle, who is also an ambassador for Artscape Daniels Launchpad. “I think it will keep artists working. A lot of people leave school and then they can’t afford the equipment or get access to the tools they need to do their craft. When I left school I didn’t have access to a pattern-cutting table or an industrial sewing machine, things that I needed. It just made it so much harder to do what I wanted to do. I think that’s such an important aspect of what Launchpad will be able to provide to a much larger community.”