What happens when a tradition is allowed to change?
For jewellery designer Sabina Dragusanu, the answer begins with looking back. Her collection Ad Infinitum, developed during her MA Jewellery Design at Central Saint Martins, takes inspiration from Romanian craft traditions and asks how their visual language might continue in a contemporary world. Rather than recreating traditional objects or motifs exactly, Dragusanu is interested in what can happen when their structures, rhythms and meanings are taken apart and rebuilt through jewellery.
Romanian heritage has become an increasingly important part of her practice. She is particularly drawn to traditional craft as a way of carrying stories and cultural memory between generations. “Rather than reproducing traditional objects directly, I look for ways to reinterpret these references through a contemporary design language,” she says. For Dragusanu, jewellery offers an especially personal way of doing this because these ideas can quite literally be carried on the body.
The starting point for Ad Infinitum came from two different but connected elements of Romanian material culture: woven fishing baskets and the carved rope motif found in traditional wooden architecture and domestic objects. At first, they might seem like very different references. One is created by weaving lines together, while the other is carved into wood as a continuous form. But Dragusanu noticed something shared between them: repetition.
“I started to see a connection between these processes and the ideas I wanted to explore through jewellery,” she explains.
Repetition, rhythm and continuity became the foundations of the collection. Dragusanu was fascinated by Romanian woodcarving not only for its visual qualities, but for the relationship between decoration, symbolism and architecture. Traditional carved gates, columns and domestic objects can be deeply sculptural, while their motifs carry meanings beyond decoration. Woven structures offered a different way of thinking about the same ideas, showing how simple repeated gestures can create strength and complexity.
One motif became particularly important: the Romanian “rope of eternity”. Formed through a continuous twisting line, the motif has traditionally been associated with continuity, connection and the endless cycle of life. Dragusanu found in it a way of thinking about cultural inheritance that felt relevant to her own practice.
“For me, it became a way of thinking about cultural inheritance, not as something static or fixed in the past, but as something that continues to change as it is carried forward,” she says.
That idea sits at the heart of Ad Infinitum. The collection is not an attempt to preserve Romanian tradition exactly as it was. Instead, it considers what happens when a traditional visual language is given room to evolve. The rope becomes more than a decorative reference. Dragusanu began to explore it as a structure capable of shaping an entire piece, creating forms that loop, weave, wrap around one another and seem to have no clear beginning or end.
Even the title reflects this thinking. Ad Infinitum, meaning “to infinity” or “without end”, describes both the visual quality of the pieces and the wider idea behind them. Cultural traditions survive because they are carried forward, interpreted and changed. Jewellery, too, can move through time. A piece can remain with someone for decades, becoming connected to memory before eventually being passed to another person.
Material plays an important role in that conversation. Dragusanu combines carved walnut with woven sterling silver, bringing together materials and techniques that allow the collection to sit between different worlds. Wood creates a direct physical connection to the Romanian craft traditions that inspired the work, while silver places those references within a contemporary jewellery context.
The collection also uses recycled silver and reclaimed, surplus or offcut walnut wherever possible. For Dragusanu, sustainability is not simply about selecting recycled materials. It is also about thinking differently about production, longevity and value. She is interested in creating fewer, more considered pieces rather than designing around constant replacement or seasonal trends.
“Jewellery has the potential to be kept for a lifetime, repaired, inherited and passed between generations,” she says. “I think emotional durability is an important part of sustainability: if an object has meaning to someone, they are much more likely to care for it and keep it.”
This idea of longevity extends into the way the jewellery is made. Digital design and fabrication are important tools in Dragusanu’s process. Digital modelling allows her to develop complex forms and test proportions, while CNC milling helps translate digitally developed geometries into walnut. But the digital process is never the end of the making.
The pieces are carved, refined, assembled, polished and extensively hand-finished. Dragusanu deliberately allows the precision of digital manufacturing to meet the irregularity of working by hand. It is this contrast that gives the work its particular character, bringing together technology and craftsmanship rather than treating them as opposing approaches.
In this sense, Ad Infinitum reflects the wider question behind the collection: how can something remain connected to its origins while becoming something new?
For Dragusanu, the answer is not through exact preservation. It is through transformation. Her Romanian heritage and her contemporary education at Central Saint Martins come together in a practice that moves between cultural memory and experimentation, traditional craft and digital fabrication, permanence and change.
The resulting jewellery is sculptural and contemporary, but its references run deeper than surface decoration. Ad Infinitum invites the wearer to think about jewellery as something capable of holding stories, memory and identity. Its continuous forms become a reminder that culture is never entirely fixed. It survives through movement — through the people who reinterpret it, wear it and carry it forward.
For Sabina Dragusanu, that is what makes tradition worth returning to: not to keep it unchanged, but to allow it to continue.
