about gianani

Before 2002 I would have dismissed as impossible any prediction that I might one day stay up into the early hours of the morning designing earrings! I have always admired beautiful jewelry but from a great distance. In my daily life jewelry played absolutely no role. I rarely thought of it and never wore any. As a child I was attracted to beads but in the years of growing up I lost touch with my childhood interest. So in introducing myself I don't have a story about how I have always wanted to design jewelry. I did not choose to create jewelry. Jewelry chose me. It embraced me one fine Saturday morning in the Fall of 2002 and has since then held me close. At the time I was teaching at a university in my chosen academic career. One day in order to divert myself from teaching and grading and to have some weekend fun I decided to take a short course on beading offered by the university art department. At the end of the three day course I had become, in important ways, a very different person. Magic happened on that Saturday when I learned to make earrings. I took to it instantly with my whole being, and since then I have not been able to stop making earrings. I don't wear earrings so my passion for making them is strange and inexplicable to me. In a few years I left academics and plunged into the unknown world of jewelry designing.

What I find so intoxicating about creating earrings is the challenge of generating excitement, tension, and energy with a few beads within a very limited space. I now also enjoy designing bracelets partly because I picture bracelets as extra long earrings, with a clasp. Beads allow one to express emotions with form, texture, and color. And I love that. However, there came a point in my creative journey when I felt the need to also express myself in other ways and through other means. I combined my life-long love for drawing and painting with my new passion for designing jewelry, and so I began to do miniature paintings on wood. My admiration for Chinese and Arabic calligraphy inspired me to experiment with calligraphy in my own language, Bengali (I am from Kolkata, India). My “bead compositions”, “wood compositions”, and calligraphy represent different but complementary creative sides, each allowing me different avenues of self-expression. 

It's been an incredible journey of growth and exploration. From being a student, then a teacher, I became a student again as I traveled along new ways. From learning wire working to creating mix media art, from managing a small business to maintaining a website, from networking with bead artists to choosing the right shade of green for booth display, from photographing scores of earrings to designing and creating promotional brochures -- new pathways have daily enriched my life.  And, while academic-to-artisan can seem such a radical transition, much of what I learned in the past -- writing, communication, networking, and presentations -- has continued to serve me well in this life. 

However, no one can do things alone. We all need help and support and I have received plenty of it from wonderful friends, and from Wolfgang, the love of my life, without whose limitless support I would be able to do little.

Also this website would not exist without the initiative and generous help of Erica Kroll, who turned my vision for this website into reality and first placed it in the internet.

what's in a name?

Finding a name for my creative venture took time. I waited for the right name just as I wait for the right design to come to me. One day while leafing through the pages of the journals of the famous fourteenth century Moroccan traveler Ibn Batuta, I came across the city of “Janani” that Ibn Batuta had visited during his travels in South Asia. What struck me as remarkable was that Janani is now a lost city. It no longer exists. As is true with many cities in history, time has erased it. Not only did I love the beautiful lilting sound of the word, the idea of a lost city appealed to me as a symbol of change, transience, and impermanence, the very essence of the natural world from which we as well as the jewelry we wear emerge.

Thank you very much for your interest in my work. Enjoy the visit.

ishita ghosh