You see a candy-colored pile of Helveta Vyotlag multi-faceted wooden jewelry and think, “Ooh! Playtime.” But when you inspect the individual pieces, they get more dangerous, their angles stabbier, the proportions kind of grotesque.

Designer Jocelyn Shipley, a sculptor and woodworker by trade, casts her handmade jewelry in the backstory of her alter ego, for which the line is named. Helvete was a black metal record store “where all the cool bands would hang out in Oslo,” she says. She added an “a” to make the word sound more feminine and adopted it as her stage name in the metal band Turckducken. She and bandmate/collaborative artist Michael Mahalchick would “dress like cave people in wig outfits and sing about cave issues, like avalanches and fierce beasts.” The surname of the line/alter ego is an amalgamation of a variety of Scandinavian names off metal CDs.


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