These rings are made from recycled 18K yellow gold, and were designed and handcrafted in Bali with the pearls and stones set in Bangkok. Photograph courtesy of Carina Hardy
Love and creation shape the story of these two jewelry makers.
In Bali, the air is thick with incense from a nearby upacara, one of the island’s many ceremonies, drifting into the open space where jewelry designers Carina Hardy and Tavish Gallagher sit side by side.
Outside, the intersection is filled with a pyramid of offerings, stacked knee high. To Hardy and Gallagher, the sight resonates with their own practice. Hardy ties what surrounds them to their craft: “Everything is born from love; it all comes from that place, within each other, and also within the things that we make.”
Gallagher finishes her thought without missing a beat: “We live in an environment where it feels like all the beauty here is rooted in love.” To live and work here, they explain, is to move inside that current, where the notion of care is ordinary and constant, and where their studio finds its grounding.
They rarely pause between dialogues, their sentences tumbling into each other like a long-running conversation they’ve been having for years. Gallagher laughs when Hardy recalls the first night they met. “From the first night we met, we were designing,” she says. “Though [we] didn’t call [it] that when we were together then.” She continues, “From then on, love and the desire to create things have been very wound up in our story together.”
They describe their work and their relationship in the same terms, bound together and written by two hands. Design and connection blur into one, kept alive through tenderness and workmanship. Hardy puts it plainly: “Without love, it’s stripped bare. Always checking in with that feeling is a good barometer of us being true to ourselves and each other.”
The rings, pendants, even nursing cups cast from recycled silver preserve the intricacies of their craft and the imprint of a dialogue that never stops moving between them. Every piece, she notes, “exists in the space that is between us.”
Launching Carina Hardy Studio on International Women’s Day in 2024 was intentional. The date positioned their values as clearly as their aesthetics, extending the spirit of Hardy’s earlier Elppin brooch, the eye-shaped clasp that became, in her words, a “highway to intimacy.” It drew out stories women hadn’t voiced before, often turning into conversations that became deeply transformative.
Those early exchanges taught her that jewelry could be both expression and empowerment, a founding lesson that still guides the studio. Choosing International Women’s Day gave that ethos form. Gallagher calls it a reminder that “every day is about women,” and a gesture to those who had followed Elppin that their commitment to empowerment and beauty remained. The studio calls its philosophy “Rooted in Love,” their interpretation of Tri Hita Karana, the Balinese principle of harmony with the divine, with people, and with nature. “It isn’t a motto we apply after the fact,” Gallagher says. “It’s our north star that guides every single decision we make.”
Limiting editions keep them from losing their sense of love for the craft. Pendants are designed to turn inward, rings are engraved on the inside with hidden details, and carvings conceal stories that are only visible to the wearers themselves. “It gives the wearer this wonderful opportunity if they so choose to share something intimate about the piece [and] perhaps themselves,” Gallagher reflects. The pair emphasize that jewelry, like people, can contain multiple selves.
“The work has to feel alive with love and humanness.”
Their influences translate the philosophy into objects. Stages reinterprets Gustav Klimt’s figures and gold-leaf tapestries through textured metal and warm sapphires. Venus shelters Botticelli’s goddess within a sculptural droplet of water, protective and intimate at once. Hardy delights in the obsessive minutiae best viewed under a magnifying glass, 10 miniature fingers chiseled in gold or a mother’s posture disguised within a band. Gallagher emphasizes movement: rings that swivel, pendants that whirl, objects designed so that every facet and feature of the piece will never be forgotten.
The studio’s people-first approach begins in their process. Ideas gather through photographs, loose sketches, or even lumps of clay, before being translated into wax by Ngurah, a carver from Tampaksiring whose family has practiced the craft for generations. Gallagher describes it as mystical. “The Balinese believe the creative spirit is channelled through people,” he explains. When Ngurah carves, it goes beyond execution. He’s channeling his own lineage, “breathing life into the wax.” It’s a conversation in three dimensions. Technical drawings come only after a piece has gone through multiple iterations in silver. “We get to bypass the bureaucratic systems that suffocate creativity,” Hardy adds. “[The work] has to feel alive with love and humanness.”
They don’t expect their work to please everyone, and they’re fine with that. Distinctiveness, Gallagher argues, is the highest compliment: when someone sees a piece and says they’ve never encountered anything like it. That recognition, even without universal approval, is enough.
If meaning begins in the making, it extends to how pieces find their wearers. Hardy recalls a mother and daughter instinctively drawn to pearl rings already named for them. Gallagher shares a stirring memory of an individual who gravitated toward a particular piece in a way that felt almost fated, her choice carrying a weight only she understood. “These synchronicities you can’t make it up,” he points out. “When they can see themselves reflected in the jewelry, it feels like a perfect match. It’s the wearer and the human relationship that completes [a piece].”
The couple reiterates that intimacy doesn’t look the same for everyone, but each person’s interpretation is what gives the jewelry its meaning.
That ripple of connection has travelled farther than they expected. Rihanna has worn their sculptural keepsakes, as have Winnie Harlow and Melissa Barrera. That recognition matters less as celebrity endorsement and more as a second life conveyed through the stories of those who wear it. “Each woman brings their own individuality,” Hardy recalls. “It expands the life of the jewelry in ways Tavish and I could never have imagined.” In an industry where visibility often leans on stylists and red carpets, their work circulates in a more organic way through conversations and encounters, moving from Ubud into the wider circles of culture.
Their latest initiative, SUSUBU, carries that sense of closeness into the realm of nurturing. Nursing cups crafted from recycled silver are donated to Bumi Sehat, the Ubud foundation where Hardy once volunteered as a teenager. She recalls scrubbing bathtubs after water births, massaging women through contractions, witnessing 11 live births before she was eighteen. “That shaped so much of how I see women in the world,” she admits. Now, through SUSUBU, those cups become functional heirlooms, passed from one woman to another, bearing both memory and healing. “It formalizes what Carina has always done,” Gallagher says. “Taking women to the clinic when they needed care.” Now, it’s built into their work.
The studio is growing, with a new workspace underway and experiments in bowls, candlesticks, even door handles. Yet at its core, nothing shifts.
Whether they remain a duo or grow into something larger, their work will always return to the same anchor: the closeness they share and the home that surrounds them. “We plan on growing,” Gallagher says, “but we’ll always be rooted here in Bali.” Hardy follows, “The intimacy between us is what everything is built on. That never changes.”
What lasts are the people: the carver whose lineage informs the wax, the mothers who pass down silver cups, the daughters who inherit pearl rings. Like the offerings outside their door, the work carries forward in the lives it reaches.
See more exclusive photographs from this story in the November 2025 Issue of Vogue Philippines, available at the link below.
