HEROBJECTS Crafts Saudi Arabia in Gold

Dunes, coastlines and organic forms become wearable objects in HEROBJECTS’ sculptural take on Saudi jewellery.

HEROBJECTS Crafts Saudi Arabia in Gold
Mai El Mokadem

A pomegranate seed. The curve of a dune. The coastline seen from above. For Saudi jewellery label HEROBJECTS, these shapes become objects small enough to wear around your neck.

HEROBJECTS

HEROBJECTS

Founded by Nouf Musallam from a studio in Jeddah, HEROBJECTS treats jewellery as an exploration of form, proportion and the body. Its central pieces are solid 18-karat gold pendants — rounded, irregular forms that look as though they could have been shaped by hand, worn smooth by water or picked up somewhere in the desert.

That relationship with form began before the brand itself. Nouf previously worked across styling and editorial, experiences that sharpened her attention to proportion, texture and the way an object sits against the body. With HEROBJECTS, she moved from arranging objects around the body to designing them herself.

HEROBJECTS

HEROBJECTS

The name itself comes from the brand’s “hero objects.” Pronounced “HER OBJECTS,” the designs play with feminine and masculine energies and the idea of jewellery existing simultaneously as ornament and object: something sculptural, but still intimate enough to live against the body. At the centre of each piece is the aforementioned “HERO object”: a sculptural form made from solid 18-karat gold and intended to embody something of Saudi Arabia itself. The objects can be worn across interchangeable necklaces, allowing the same pendant to move between different materials and arrangements.

HEROBJECTS

HEROBJECTS’ sense of Saudi Arabia is not fixed in the past. Vast desert horizons and long-held traditions sit alongside the contemporary art and architecture shaping the Kingdom today, creating a visual language built as much around continuity as heritage. The desert and Red Sea coastline appear not as literal illustrations, but through curves, spirals and organic shapes that recall dunes and aerial views of the land. The pomegranate seed appears repeatedly, a form long associated in Arab culture with beauty and abundance, but also with the idea of many lives existing within a single form.

The idea of interchangeability feels fitting for a brand so preoccupied with the relationship between object and wearer. In its campaign imagery, polished gold appears against unfinished clay, pearls spill across hands and faces, and jewellery sits beside shells, sand and rough surfaces. Precious materials are treated less preciously, photographed as objects to touch, move around and live with.

HEROBJECTS

HEROBJECTS may draw its forms from Saudi Arabia, but it avoids diminishing that identity to familiar symbols. Nouf, rather, looks at the country almost abstractly: its textures, geography and naturally occurring shapes become the starting point for a contemporary jewellery language of her own. From Jeddah to its London studio, HEROBJECTS is making a case for jewellery as an object that can carry a whole country with it.

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