“To innovate comes from a root word that means to renew or to make new. It doesn’t necessarily mean to start from the very beginning to destroy and start again.”
That distinction, offered by Heidi Holder, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s outgoing chair of education, gets to the heart of Vacheron Constantin’s latest exploration of craftsmanship.
The Swiss watchmaker and the Met marked the culmination of their inaugural artisan residency on Friday, unveiling three works that extend traditional craft into new forms of expression. Launched in 2025 as part of a partnership established two years earlier, the program brought together woodworker Aspen Golann, ceramicist Ibrahim Said and goldsmith Joy Harvey for an exchange of expertise with the museum’s curators, conservators and scholars, and Vacheron’s artisans in Geneva.
For a maison whose patrimony dates to 1755, the initiative reflects a broader ambition: not merely safeguarding centuries-old savoir-faire, but giving it contemporary relevance.
That proposition is particularly resonant in watchmaking, where the mechanical timepiece has long transcended its practical function. In an increasingly digital, instantaneous world, the appeal of a mechanical watch lies partly in its deliberate anachronism: a miniature feat of engineering whose intricate workings depend on accumulated human knowledge, patience and precision. Its continued cultural currency speaks to a wider appreciation for objects that bear the imprint of their makers.
“It’s not about replicating the past,” said Christian Selmoni, Vacheron Constantin’s style and heritage director. “I think it’s very much about using creativity, innovation, to make your creation relevant in the world in which we are living today.”
That philosophy extends beyond the Met. At Homo Faber in Venice in September, Vacheron presented six concept watches developed through its One of Not Many Crafts Programme, inviting artisans specializing in disciplines ranging from glass sculpture to micro-origami to translate their techniques onto watch dials.
The Met residency reverses that proposition, allowing the precision and discipline of watchmaking to inform objects far removed from the wrist.
Golann, whose practice is rooted in traditional furniture making, created Vessel, a 5-foot-tall carved wooden work. During her time in Geneva, she was struck by Vacheron’s willingness to devote resources to experimentation, observing artisans engaged in training and speculative projects without predetermined commercial outcomes.
For Golann, who typically works within the financial constraints of an independent practice, the experience offered a different understanding of creative possibility. She subsequently spent six months developing prototypes, repeatedly testing and discarding ideas for an object unlike anything she had previously made.
“I think this residency allowed me to grow an entire new arm of my practice,” she said.
She defined her understanding of craft is less concerned with individual virtuosity than with the accumulation of knowledge across generations, a collective endeavor that continues to evolve.
“As long as I know this language of craft, I can use it to say anything that I want,” she said.
Harvey took a more subversive approach. Her Ruined Splendour — Bronze Diadem, incorporating more than 2,000 handmade chain links, explores beauty, destruction and the passage of time. After learning guilloché from one of Vacheron’s master artisans, she deliberately hammered and distorted the precisely engraved metal, challenging the pursuit of perfection intrinsic to watchmaking.
Said, meanwhile, drew on an ancient Egyptian New Year’s flask in the Met’s collection for Shaping Time, a monumental ceramic structure that reinterprets the forms and motifs of his cultural heritage.
Together, the works suggest that preserving craft requires more than maintaining its technical vocabulary. It requires allowing that vocabulary to evolve.
The exchange speaks to a broader shift in how craft is continuing to be understood, not as a static inheritance but as a living body of knowledge, continually shaped by those who practice it. For Vacheron Constantin, whose identity is rooted in technical mastery, the residency offers a way to extend its patrimony beyond the confines of watchmaking. For the Met, it brings the traditions housed within its collection into dialogue with contemporary makers, ensuring that centuries of accumulated knowledge remain not only preserved, but practiced, challenged and renewed.
“We preserve objects, but we also need to think about what happens next for the next institution like ours, in another 150 years from now,” Holder said.