A shared commitment to craftsmanship
Since 2023, Vacheron Constantin and The Metropolitan Museum of Art have united around a shared ambition: preserving artistic heritage while allowing craftsmanship to evolve through contemporary creation.
The Artisan Residency Programme embodies this vision through mentorship, experimentation and the transmission of knowledge.
Between tradition and innovation
Three artists. Three materials. Three interpretations.
Drawing inspiration from The Met’s collections and Vacheron Constantin’s Métiers d’Art workshops, three artisans explored centuries-old techniques through their own materials, cultures and creative languages.
Aspen Golann
Cabinetmaking · Wood carving · Carpentry · Sculpture
During her time at Vacheron Constantin, American artist Aspen Golann spent her days alongside the Maison's engravers and enamellers, learning techniques she had never before had reason to use: the patient carving of a dial's relief, the layering of colour beneath a torch.
What she took from the ateliers found its way into a monumental carved wooden vessel standing five feet tall: a piece built, like a watch, gesture by gesture.
Ibrahim Said
Ceramics · Modelling · Engraving
Ibrahim Said arrived at Vacheron Constantin already steeped in Egyptian ceramic tradition, shaping clay into forms that carry the memory of ancient motifs. In the Maison's ateliers, his exchanges around engraving, enamelling and lacquer painting opened a new direction for that practice, one he carried into a three-tiered vertical structure, as wide as it is tall (4 feet 6 inches x 3 feet).
Ceramics and Haute Horlogerie rarely share a workshop, yet both rest on the same exacting discipline: total control over a material that forgives nothing. Said's structure borrows precision from the Maison's engravers and applies it to clay. A craft, in his hands, already fluent in patience.
Joy Harvey
Goldsmithing · Guilloché
At Vacheron Constantin, goldsmith Joy Harvey spent her residency alongside the Maison's guilloché artisans, learning a discipline built on repetition and restraint. She engraved the floral motifs of a bronze diadem, cast in a custom alloy of 60% gold, using the guilloché technique, then deliberately distorted them by hammer, working against the very precision she had just learned.
Harvey's diadem explores beauty, imperfection and the passage of time, the same questions guilloché has quietly asked for centuries, one repeated line at a time. Her residency brought two crafts built on precision face to face, and let one show the other what happens when it is deliberately undone.
Ancient gestures. New expressions.
A partnership built to last
What began in 2023 as a shared ambition between Vacheron Constantin and The Metropolitan Museum of Art has become an ongoing exchange: each residency adding a new material, a new perspective, a new way of asking what craftsmanship can still become.
The Artisan Residency Programme is not a single moment, but a continuing commitment to mentorship, to experimentation, and to passing on what is learned.
Craftsmanship
is a living heritage
For Vacheron Constantin, transmission has been part of its history since 1755. Through mentorship and collaboration, craftsmanship is not only preserved, it is continually enriched, challenged and passed forward.
