Brutal Gold and Shocking Plastic by Björn Wekström

One summer day in 1958, Mrs. Aho walked into the only Gallery of Contemporary Jewelry Art in Helsinki, and she wasn’t empty-handed. In her hands, she carried a vodka bottle filled with gold dust and nuggets. She wanted a fashionable and unique piece of jewelry made from her gold. The gallery owner (who was also a jeweler himself), Björn Weckström, took on the project. As an experiment, he created a necklace using the largest nuggets, leaving them unpolished.

No one had ever worked in this raw gold brutalist style - Raw Gold - before. Nevertheless, the client was delighted and asked if something could also be made from the remaining gold dust in the bottle. From the dust, Weckström cast small jewelry pieces in the form of mini-sculptures. These too bore no resemblance to the classical gold Scandinavian consumers were used to at the time. Thus, Björn Weckström and Mrs. Aho unwittingly launched a new era in gold jewelry art - modernism. 

Weckström had a practical education in jewelry-making, which allowed him to stay at the intersection of art and craftsmanship throughout his life. His knowledge of materials, especially precious metals, spurred a radical transformation in jewelry and sculpture design. In the early 1960s, he became one of the founders of the innovative and now iconic jewelry brand and production house “Lapponia.” In 1969, he cast his first plastic sculptures, marking the beginning of a monumental direction in his work.

Björn wasn’t the first jeweler in his family. His grandfather and uncle had also worked with precious metals and stones. His grandfather John Weckström's workshop operated in the small southern Finnish town of Tammisaari in the early 20th century, and one of its visitors was none other than the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II, who stopped by during a cruise through the Gulf of Finland.

In the 1950s, European jewelers were already experimenting with new, non-classical forms that we now recognize as modernist. Yet gold remained the most conservative area in jewelry art. The same was true in sculpture: the public didn’t always receive new forms—especially in public spaces—positively. Weckström wanted to be a sculptor, but at first, he had to work with mini-sculptures on private commission.

After the incident with Mrs. Aho, Weckström created a massive gold pendant in the Raw Gold style called “Flowering Wall,” which he sent to Brazil for a jewelry competition celebrating the 400th anniversary of Rio de Janeiro. He received worldwide recognition, winning the Grand Prix. This is how the world first learned about Weckström’s Finnish gold - a phenomenon that has remained fashionable and relevant for over 60 years. “Perhaps the pendant resembled the works of pre-Columbian American masters, which played a role,” the designer later remarked about his success.

It was with this jewelry and gold that Weckström’s fame began; his work still holds a special place in Scandinavian culture. A major exhibition of Björn Weckström’s work “Man, Machine, and Jewelry Art” was recently held at the Didrichsen Museum in Helsinki, featuring 86 of the master’s pieces that illustrate his professional journey. Unfortunately, given the current difficult times, Russians were hardly able to attend. As a witness, I’ll try to fill in this gap for the Russian reader.

Yoko Ono and the Shocking Polymers

“I wanted to make something fundamentally new and different,” the designer once said. Before Weckström, no one had thought to combine gold and plastic in a single piece of jewelry. He chose a polymer material - acrylic. “The combination of cheap acrylic and precious metal shocked people,” the artist recalled. “Plastics weren’t used in jewelry; buyers simply didn’t accept it.”

Then fate intervened. In the window of Weckström’s showroom in Gothenburg were some of his most unusual acrylic pieces, including a massive ring called “Petrified Lake.” As it happened, the star couple John Lennon and Yoko Ono were visiting the city at the time. They saw the ring in the window, and John bought it for Yoko.

Later, the couple appeared on The Dick Cavett Show on American television, and Yoko was wearing that very ring. The camera zoomed in on it several times. After the broadcast, orders started pouring in to Lapponia from around the world.

Interestingly, the plastic era didn’t last long. With the oil crisis of the 1970s, plastics began to fall out of use, and Weckström shifted to more traditional Finnish materials like art glass, as well as stone and bronze.

The Most Famous Finnish Jewelry Piece

Björn Weckström is the author of the most famous piece of jewelry ever to come out of Finland.

In 1977, a phone call came to the Lapponia office. On the line was an American - the secretary of George Lucas, director of Star Wars. 

It turned out Lucas had come across Weckström’s work and wanted him to create an exclusive piece of jewelry for the film. Time was short, only six weeks, so the jeweler got to work. But soon after, Lucas’s secretary called again with bad news: the schedule had been moved up, and only one week remained. Creating a new piece in such a short time was, of course, impossible.

The solution was to use existing pieces. The designer suggested visiting his Bond Street showroom in London (where the film was also being shot) and selecting something from there. In the final scene of the film, Princess Leia appears wearing the silver necklace Planetoid Valleys and the bracelet Darina. This is how the world came to know the modernist jewelry of Lapponia and Weckström - Finnish jewelry art.

A New Mythology

The most striking part of the exhibition was undoubtedly the artist’s sculptures. His early monumental acrylic works are meditative, filled with an almost otherworldly energy. This period coincided with Weckström’s interest in Zen Buddhism.

In the 1970s, he shifted toward a more realistic style, drawing on classical mythology. He spent long periods living in Italy at the time, which likely influenced both his sculptural language and choice of materials. Weckström is often called a narrative sculptor. His works tell stories and reinterpret myths in the context of modern realities - be it space exploration, genetic modification, or technological progress. The classical mythological language makes his ideas universal and globally comprehensible. 

Take, for instance, the centaur figure - not a blend of man and horse, but of man and machine (a motorcycle). “How will society move forward in this inevitable fusion of humans and machines?” Weckström asks. 

Some sculptures now seem prophetic. For example, during the Gulf War in 1991, Weckström created The Blind Runner, centered on our vulnerability to distorted information and the multiple “truths” of various media. According to the artist, we are all like blind people running over burning coals - lost in a media cacophony where it’s hard to tell what’s real. 

Through his works, Björn challenges society, urging us to reflect on the profound changes happening before our eyes. And that, undoubtedly, affects you just as deeply as his earlier “Buddhist” creations - for asking the right question is often more important than getting an answer.