Coincidence is what made me venture into the world of Jewelry.
Architecture will always be the Mother of all Arts.
As an A student in Architecture and a fresh graduate I always had big ideas and dreams to change the world through design. But when it came to the real world, i often felt restricted by budget, guidelines, boxed briefs, etc… So the dreams I had started to diminish.
I never seemed able to have full freedom except through art: let it be painting, sculpture, poetry. The more I delve into Arts the more I discover things within myself, until one day I was fiddling with 3D printed plastic Modules and they fit perfectly in my fingers. Each time I discovered a new way of wearing them. One day I would wear it as a ring, the other day I would wear two opposite Modules as a dual ring or one in each hand, next day I would wear them combined in the opposite sides as a mini heart-shaped pendant, then slide it into a rubber bracelet, until one day one of the Modules broke & I decided to print another pair and find a jewel teller who can manufacture them for me in gold.
It was a long hard journey, that took me from Dubai Gold Souk to Beirut’s Burj Hammoud to Istanbul's Grand Bazar to Vicenza in Italy and back to Dubai until I landed an old man’s tiny shop in Dubai Gold Souk, Haj Nicolas Kasermelli back in 2013, who heard my agony on getting to the perfect finishing of my Module.
Every time I tried to execute the Module, the challenge was to get the internal facets as clean and smooth as the external, but it was not. The internal facets were all bumpy and bevelled.
Haj Nicolas, as perfectionist and picky as I am and more, told me one thing: In his 65 years of age he has seen nothing like this. It is what he also called the “abstaining simplicity”. So beautiful and simple, yet so hard to achieve. But he loved it so much he decided to take it as a personal challenge and adopted me as his own designer child.
After 2.5 years of trials around many jewelry famous cities, the stunning plastic Module turned to a beauty of Gold by Haj Nicolas’ artist hands.
It was my own piece of beloved jewelry until my friends and friends of friends wanted to have one as well.
Two years later, over a Christmas dinner, a young gentleman asks me about the designer ring I am wearing, and I tell him it's my own design. Excitedly he asks if I would sell him one before the new year as he is planning to propose to his girlfriend back home.
I was so happy by the idea, yet I didn't have a Module with a bling, but he didn't mind and requested one thing: to engrave his initials and hers “N”, which I did.
After a month from the incident, I got to learn that “N” is a Hashemite Princess of the Kingdom of Jordan. And that is when I decided it’s time to launch the Module to the world.
In 2017, I launched the “Celestial Module”, a piece of wearable art capsule in the "Celestial Constellation" under "Nohma" Design.
The first launch took place in April 2017 in Geneva, followed by a launch in Ayyam Gallery DIFC in June 2017.
One year after the launch, I was asked for an interview in one of the Middle East's top jewelry and watches magazines. Few weeks after the interview, I got a request from the editor-in-chief who is a prominent jewelry and watches connoisseur to upload my media materials on a link to be enrolled into the Middle East jewelry competition. And to my surprise, I got a call a month after: “Nohma, you’re one of the 3 finalists among 450 entries most of which are International Jewelry Designers”.
“No way” I thought to myself, not because I doubted my Celestial Modules weren't good enough to be the winner, but because I was embedded for a month with a broken right foot and wasn't ready to get out of the house. But who cares, I’ll wear a ballerina on one foot and the cast in the other. It's about my design, my art, my passion, my "Celestial Module"!