The Story Behind unca studio

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.

Long before I knew anything about watch mechanisms, I was already drawn to the steampunk aesthetic itself - the gears, the brass, the sense of a world half Victorian, half machine. 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 borrowing the look of mechanism, 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 mechanical fragments - gears, cogs, pallet levers, watch hands - carefully gathered and completed with other decorative elements chosen for the same mechanical aesthetic, then 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.