Danish goldsmith Gitte Bjørn on her lifelong love affair with metal

Gitte Bjørn’s array of tools – the saws and files, the blow-torches and hammers – look like something out of a medieval torture chamber. Her hands are usually bruised, the skin missing in places on her fingers. “I am forever getting hurt, but unless it was a bigger work accident, I never really know how it happened. I have had to get used to it,” she says. As we chat, she soaks the fingers of her right hand in hot, soapy water to disinfect the cuts and scrapes.

Bjørn has known since she was 10 years old that she wanted to be a goldsmith. Today, at 57, Bjørn has come face-to-face with her biological limitations. Moving metal, after all, requires physical strength and her arms, hands and fingers are not getting any stronger. “My eyesight is probably not getting better either,” she adds, for good measure. However, Bjørn’s creativity – a word that, according to her, has been thoroughly abused – has never been more vibrant.

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Her jewellery and hollowware, oft zoological motifs that also examine the body and soul, are imbued with humour. “We have to be able to laugh,” she says. “Well-made and intelligently conceived silver for the table and gorgeous jewellery makes life worth living.” A self-described introvert, Bjørn is happiest when she is working or when she is with her boyfriend, Tavs Ritzau, with whom she has been living for 12 years. “Around him, I actually turn into something of a cuddly snuggle bug,” she admits.

We are sitting in Bjørn and Ritzau’s cottage in Grønholt in northern Zealand, Denmark, a warm space filled with eclectic furniture and nicknacks. The coffee table was originally made of teak, but Bjørn had one of her friends help her cover it in metal. “I thought the coffee table was absolutely hideous, so I had to do something about it,” she says. “I got it done while Tavs was away fishing in Norway.” The piano in the corner belongs to Tavs. It’s his third – his enthusiastic playing, which fills the home as Bjørn works, tends to wear the instruments out.

Grow ing up the youngest of three children in a fairly traditional household, Bjørn took to her craft intuitively. In 1975, when her maternal grandfather was on his deathbed, Bjør n’s mother had to find something to keep her “occupied and out of the way”. “Before we got to my grandparents’ house one day, she let me choose some small items in a hobby and hardware shop, and I picked out some copper thread and beads. My mother’s younger brother managed to find me a small anvil, a hammer and three pliers and I spent hours that afternoon in the basement at my grandparents’, happily banging away with my little tools,” Bjørn recalls. “That evening, back at our own house, I knew I was meant to be a goldsmith. Nothing else would do.”

Despite that darkly romantic origin story, what came next was less mythical. Upon finishing elementary school, landing an apprenticeship took Bjørn several years. Finally, in 1986, she succeeded in finding one, only for the company to go bankrupt two years later. “The first smithy where I began my apprenticeship did large, chunky 1970s silver jewellery, which was a bit outdated,” she says. “However, for me it was wonderful, because I got to learn so much.”

With a year and a half of training left, she had to find a second placement. This time around, Bjørn lucked out, securing a coveted position with renowned Danish gold smith Flemming Lund. “He did the complete opposite of the first place I had been, and in a way this rounded off my education nicely,” she says. “I had training in making heavy silver jewellery first, and then moved on to the very light-weight gold jewellery that was the height of fashion at the time.”

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After passing her apprentice test, Bjørn went on to work for the grand old Danish silversmith institution Georg Jensen. “At the time, Georg Jensen had 70 goldsmiths employed, all the special crafts gathered under the same roof: silversmithing, goldsmithing, casting, an enamel workshop, a prototyping workshop and gem-setting,” she says. “It was the place for me to learn a lot of practical lessons in product ion work.” After a year at Georg Jensen, Bjørn began working under her own name.

Bjørn’s trajectory, coupled with her innate obsession with craftsmanship, places her firmly in the Danish tradition of gold and silversmiths. Fitting neatly into the country’s ideals of purity of design, Danish silverware has garnered a worldwide reputation, thanks to the likes of Henning Kopel and the aforementioned titan of silver Georg Jensen.

While Bjørn does not have the same immediate name recognition, her work is consistently included in group exhibitions of noteworthy Danish silverworks in museums across the Nordics, not to mention her solo exhibitions at Koldinghus Museum and Copenhagen’s Galleri Montan. Today her pieces are available by personal request or through select art galleries.

She began by making hollowware, having developed, as she puts it, a “resentment” towards jewellery. While that resentment may have ebbed, hollowware has remained a constant in Bjørn’s work. Take, for example, her celebrated 2015 collection “Body and Soul”, which featured spoons formed from curved, wrinkled hands of silver. An organic, crinkled vase is made surreal by the addition of ears. A set of candle holders are, rather comically, formed as a not-traditionally-attractive part of the male anatomy.

“Because hollow ware is time-consuming to make, it has almost always been treated with respect, even deference,” she says. “But I also want fun to be part and parcel of hollowware.” Bjørn has since come around on jewellery, though she “doesn’t actually wear much jewellery” herself. Still, on her index finger she dons her own Gecko ring, arguably the goldsmith’s most recognisable piece. “When I was a teenager, I had a gecko, and my first tattoo – I got my first when I was 18 years old, on my right ankle – is of a gecko,” she says.

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She made her first iteration of the ring back in 1988. The one she wears today is set with a 0.35 carat colourless diamond, tiny diamonds for eyes, and a smattering of brown diamonds down its back. Next year, Bjørn’s latest exhibition, “Tapas”, at Køppe Contemporary Objects in Rønne, Denmark, will showcase 100 of the goldsmith’s rings in 20 series of five. “I want to show people what can actually be achieved with jewellery when we dispense with conventional thinking,” she says.

Though she has been working with her craft nearly all of her life, Bjørn never hesitates to try something new. “I am driven by curiosity,” she says. In 2002, she was invited to collaborate with the jewellery brand Trollbeads. She dubbed her bead “The Happiness Dragon” and it ultimately became one of the Danish brand’s bestsellers. “I set myself the task of designing the piece around the chain, as it were, instead of simply drilling the obligatory hole in the middle of the piece,” Bjørn says. “I have to challenge myself. I don’t evolve from doing something I have done before.”