I have always leaned toward art, in different forms. I once dreamed of becoming an architect - a dream that faded along the way, but not the thirst behind it: the need to build something with my own hands, to shape an idea until it became an object. I painted, I drew the most, I sculpted - I moved through so many mediums, always searching for the place where my creativity would feel at home.
I started making jewelry a few years ago, with large metal gears cast simply in resin. They were beautiful in a cold sort of way - decorative pieces, without breath, without story. They looked at me, but told me nothing.
Slowly, I realized I wanted something else. Not empty shapes, but fragments that had already lived a life before reaching me.
That is how I discovered vintage pocket watch mechanisms - tiny gears, pinions, pallet levers, mainsprings that once measured someone's time, somewhere, with an almost silent precision. Each component already carries a history: it was assembled by hands I will never know, it ticked through hours and years, then it stopped. I do nothing more than continue the story, in a new form - this time through the eye of someone who drew, painted, and sculpted before arriving here.
Since then, every Unca Studio piece begins with these authentic mechanical fragments, carefully gathered and set in resin or assembled into wearable jewelry. Sometimes I hand paint the background behind the mechanism - a starry sky, a swirl of color - like a scene where the small gears find their place. I have always searched for a more minimal, more personal breath: not a clutter of pieces, but compositions where every gear has room to breathe.
Most pieces are one-of-a-kind - a combination of gears, a play of resin and color that will never repeat exactly the same way again. A few are made in small batches, with natural variations that keep them personal all the same.
I work by hand, in Cluj-Napoca, in the heart of Transylvania. It is a slow process, almost ritualistic - I never rush the choice of components or the final composition, because every piece is a small decision about what time looks like, reimagined.
Unca Studio exists for those who seek the combination of modern and antique - of the wild speed of everyday life and time suspended, held still, in my resin.