My name is Elisa but most people call me Lilly, I’m a mother of 3 small people and I live down a track in the middle of nowhere, next to heathland and wild forest.

La Madre Silver was born in the autumn of 2019 as a creative outlet for me when i started making jewellery and a way of stepping away from the masculine path of overworking for a large hierarchical organisation, while still trying to grow my youngest babe in my womb, and parent my 2 other children.  For years I’d been trying to juggle it all, a university degree, a 40-50hr working week, assignments and deadlines and the feeling that I could never be successful without working my way up the employment ladder. When I took a step back from this and began to create, suddenly I began to see how things could be if I connected with the feminine energy’s at play. 

I’m not talking about the feminine as a gender, but feminine as an energy. 

To me the masculine energy focuses on structure, on rising up the ladder being a measure of success, on assertiveness, leadership, qualifications, in things needing to get bigger to be better. All of these masculine traits can be good things but without the balance of the feminine, things don’t work. Things become heartless, ruthless, we burn ourselves out focusing our lives so much on rising up the hierarchy, we miss the beauty of the little things. 

The feminine is about vulnerability, honesty, nurturing, empathy, sensitivity, community over leadership, and most importantly creation. The creation of life, of art, of things made just to be beautiful, not always functional, sowing seeds to grow into flowers and food for our families and our souls.

What if to be powerful we didn’t have to be “the boss”? We didn’t use logic and reason for everything and gave ourselves permission to use our intuition and our hearts? What if we used our gentleness as our power, used our vulnerability as our strength? We didn’t need to be constantly striving for more and wages and qualifications were not the only measure of our success in this world, our gifts as mothers and lovers and creators were enough. 

La Madre is Italian for “the mother”, Italian is the language of my birth father and his side of the family, but the mother to me is a symbol of the divine feminine within us all and La Madre Silver is about celebrating that. 

All the pieces I make are carved carefully and slowly by hand, from the home I share with my family next to a forest in Dorset, before being cast into solid metals. They are made to last a lifetime and beyond, wearable pieces of art to act as talismans, to remind the owner to slow down and notice the beauty in life and to connect with the divine feminine within us all