A Mechanical Symphony of the Heart
Clockwork Love
Client
Tjep. internal project
Design
Tjep.
Design Team
Frank Tjepkema, Leonie Janssen
Production
Tjep.
Gears of Emotion, Frozen in Romantic Reverie
Envision a pendant where interlocking cogs whisper secrets of the soul—a delicate alchemy of machinery and emotion, transforming cold precision into the warm pulse of human longing. Clockwork Love, conceived by Tjep. in 2010, is a mesmerizing jewelry series that layers symbolic motifs into intricate mechanisms, capturing the six timeless moods of the heart: fragility, passion, uncertainty, desire, joy, and melancholy. Building on the audacious Bling Bling project of 2002, where logos overlapped in ironic excess, this collection elevates everyday symbols into poetic talismans, worn close to the skin as reminders of love's intricate dance.
Layered Symbols: The Anatomy of Affection
Each piece unfolds like a mechanical dream, with laser-cut elements—crafted from acrylic, gold, or paper—stacked in harmonious chaos, evoking watch gears paused mid-turn. The Love Paper edition, with its lightweight, translucent sheets, offers an ethereal fragility, while the Love Gold variant gleams with opulent warmth, and the Snow iteration scatters motifs like crystalline flakes. As Frank Tjepkema notes, these designs transcend utility, becoming "a romantic, haunting dream" where rational gears crystallize into emotional artifacts, inviting wearers to trace the fragile threads of connection amid life's relentless motion.
From Intimate Pendants to Monumental Murals
What begins as wearable whispers scales to grand statements: intimate 16x16 cm pendants evolve into XXL installations, like the ethereal canopy at La Rinascente Milano, where gears cascade from above like celestial snow, blurring the line between adornment and architecture. Debuting at Gallery Ra in Amsterdam, the series—comprising six distinct timepieces—merges graphic multiplicity with emotional depth, each layer a nod to the heart's unpredictable rhythms, crafted with the precision of a watchmaker and the poetry of a storyteller.
A Digital Rebirth in the NFT Cosmos
In a nod to enduring evolution, Clockwork Love found new life in 2021 as an NFT collection, animating the originals with intricate soundscapes, color palettes, and AI-generated poems tailored to each piece's unique traits—infusing metaphysical motion into static symbols. This digital metamorphosis honors Tjep.'s boundary-pushing ethos, proving that even in the virtual realm, a gear's quiet click can echo the soul's deepest yearnings.
Tjep.'s Provocative Pulse in Design's Machinery
More than jewelry, Clockwork Love is Tjep.'s whimsical manifesto on the mechanics of feeling: a fusion of industrial rigor and romantic irony that echoes the connective portals of House of Yes and the self-sustaining dreams of our Oogst series. It challenges us to see emotions not as fleeting sparks, but as eternal clockworks—interlocked, inevitable, and infinitely beautiful.
Wearing the Heart's Hidden Gears
Delicate yet defiant, it reminds us that one symbol's turn can set a lifetime in motion. Explore more of Tjep.'s emotive innovations on Tjep.com, where we craft not just designs, but the delicate machinery of the human spirit.