“I watched my father craft jewelry my whole life,” Ricoeur says, “and I’d studied art before going into communications. And just before COVID, as much as I really, really love my job, I was thinking how I missed making—that you have an idea in your head, use your hands to create it, and then have the final product in front of you. I was looking for that sense of fulfillment.” With the free time the pandemic afforded him, Ricoeur started making ceramics—buying the clay, messing around with it, seeing what was possible and how he could stretch himself creatively. “It was amazing reconnecting with that part of myself,” he says. “And my Dad was really happy to see me doing it.”
As Ricoeur’s birthday approached a couple of years ago, he asked his father to make him a necklace. “Not to say that thing everyone always says,” he says, laughing, “but I could never find what I wanted, so I decided to design it myself. But really it was about more than that: I wanted to wear something that connected me and my dad.” Ricoeur senior was up for it, with one caveat: He’d make the pendant, but his son had to not only design it, but carve the wax to make the mold too. Which he did, sending a tiny sculpture in the shape of a smiling face, which then became his piece of jewelry.
When Ricoeur started wearing the necklace, people noticed, asked him where he got it—and then, yes, he started to work with his father to make them as one-off commissions for his immediate circle of friends and, before long, his Instagram circle of friends. (Jewelry from Jaoven Ricoeur is available to buy via @jaoven.) Over the course of 18 months, he says, he added sun and moon designs, which he’d already been exploring with his ceramics. The sun, he realized, was very similar to one his artist mother had painted on the wall behind his bed in his childhood bedroom.