TARA COOMBER - BIOGRAPHY

As a child growing up on a small island, I have always collected rocks and fossils from the beach, this was the beginnings of my fascination with stones and gems, I would spend hours drawing rocks and shells as a child, so always wanted to be an artist of some kind.

I graduated in 1998 from the School of Jewellery, Birmingham with a BA (Hons) in Silversmithing & Jewellery where I then went onto produce many large-scale hollowware projects for private collectors and Museums including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, the Scottish Arts Society, and the Pearson Collection to name a few.

My pieces have travelled in exhibitions worldwide, but this never really satisfied me creatively as I truly wanted to be a lapidarist and gem-cutter, I have dabbled in cutting and carving softer materials over the years but it took 25 years later to finally do my ultimate dream.

There is not really anywhere to buy equipment in the UK, so I made my own to start with. An 8 inch wheeled cabbing machine and very crude faceting machine for starters, I then took the plunge and invested everything I had into buying a precision faceting machine.

I hadn’t been cutting for very long when I was approached by Gemporia to design a new gemstone cut and jewellery collection for TV, the 'Eden' cut, it was an instant sell out, I then went on to design further collections for TV.

I enjoy creating my own designed gemstones steering away from the conventional, I take inspiration from mathematical sequences, parametric design and algorithms aided design. Being a jeweller and gem-cutter enables me to combine the two disciplines giving me complete freedom of design. I am not restricted by the size and shape of a gemstone in anyway so I am very niche making one-off bespoke pieces you can’t get anywhere else. I let the stone decide what it wants to be.