Recent Press from Kim Poor

Kim Poor is one of the hottest jewellery designers around, with a past to match. A child prodigy, she left her native Brazil to study art in New York - where she caught the eye of her hero, Salvador Dali.

Brazilian artist and jewellery designer Kim Poor is a perfectionist. You can tell by the way she stops and gazes into the glass cases filled with her work in the front hall of Claridge's. She wants to be sure that the deep-green, freeze-dried leaves adorning her displays are looking crisp and beautiful, that the spotlights are illuminating her creations to perfection. You can see this same perfectionism in the exquisitely crafted jewellery which fills the cases: the painstakingly arranged semi-precious stones, the rows of freshwater pearls, and the time she spends making sure each of her clients has a piece that works for them. It's this attention to detail that makes Kim Poor's work so coveted around the world.

To trail in Kim's wake for just one afternoon is to experience the potency of her creations. Each piece, be it her celebrated art or her stunning jewellery, is a work of imagination; each has a history, just as Kim herself has an exotic and dramatic past. Born in Brazil and something of a creative child prodigy, she went to study at Parsons School of Design in New York at the age of 17. She had always admired the work of Salvador Dali and in a perfect dream-becomes-reality scenario, she encountered the artist in the city, while she was showing her paintings in a downtown gallery. As he wandered among the exhibits he paused alongside Kim's work and in effusive Spanish, christened her technique 'Diaphanism'. All at once, Kim's unique way of painting with glass on steel, which creates the effect of viewing a subject through coloured gauze, became not just a way of working but an art movement.

Her paintings have subsequently graced galleries from Rio to Ostend, private collections including Sir Paul McCartney's, and record sleeves. One of her paintings even inspired a scene in the Ridley Scott movie Bladerunner. With such prodigious and impeccable credentials, it is perhaps not surprising that Kim is now so well known among the fashion cognoscenti, with clients that include Kelly Hoppen, Baroness Thyssen and Koo Stark. As Kim explains: 'l started making pieces for myself, then friends began admiring them and wanted to buy them, and it took off from there. It seemed very natural.'

Kim's clients are certainly grateful for her diversity, even though her commitment to her art remains strong, with her exhibition in Chelsea's Durini Gallery of the legends of the Amazonian natives hailed as groundbreaking. 'The longer I'm away from home, the more I seem to be inspired by it. Sometimes it takes distance to fully realise the impact a place has on you,’ she muses, though she married an Englishman and has lived in London for many years. Kim's jewels are, in effect, miniature works of art. 'I could never have a production line, never mass-produce,' she tells me. In fact, Kim's drive to make each piece idiosyncratic, working not just with the beauty of a stone but with its unique flaws, means that she always sources her stones herself. Inspired by Brazil, she will sometimes work with its native aquamarines; other times she will find the theme for a collection in a seemingly unlikely place. 'Interestingly, my pieces for Claridge's seem to have taken on a beautiful green theme – inspired by the famous shades of the hotel's décor.’ And as she looks up and gazes admiringly at the Foyer with its magnificent chandelier, she pauses. 'Isn't it beautiful?' she marvels. I sense another moment of inspiration dawning.
^{Claire Naylor
Savoy Group Style Magazine}