Even though Babette von Dohnanyi moved many times, her Waldorf education and craft activities remained constant throughout her childhood. On her father's side, her relatives include some well-known musicians and politicians, but it was her mother's side that influenced her love of craftsmanship and talent. Her mother also accompanied her in her travels across Europe in search of goldsmith training after high school. In Florence, Babette trained as a goldsmith, and fell in love with the city and its people. Neugablonz's renowned glass and jewellery school followed. As her career progressed, Babette attended seminars that were crucial to her artistic development. Workshops with Enrico Nagai, Nikolaus Kirchner, Giampaolo Babetto, and Barbara Seidenath were particularly transformative for her. The combination of colours and materials in Babette's jewellery designs is often the guiding principle for new results. To achieve a provocative yet elegant appearance, she strives for visual balance and technical precision.

(Homo Faber presentation, Michelangelo Foundation CH)

To design jewellery means a never ending fascination.

To find new forms for the combination of color and material, to invent at the same time elegant and yet provocative solutions, is the great challenge in this process.

To achieve an optimal technical solution for this aesthetic aim in each individual piece I consider therefore as the core of my work.

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It appears that in Babette von Dohnanyi two souls exist: one in her intrinsic “direct” relationship with the materials she moulds, materials which though treated with extreme gentleness are transformed into strong block ashlar shapes like ancient stones (her bracelets and rings) or created according to a subtle restless geometry (her brooches) passed on to her by the school of Babetto where she studied in Salzburg; the other a soul that declines her “feminine” jewellery art, with references to archaic mytology and anthropology, traditionally connected to a woman’s life, to the everyday world, and embodied in a naturalness and softness. To this soul her necklaces in gold and traslucent silver belong, crocheted, lace-like and luminous, works, which in their rhytmic movement, let light filter through the perforations of the boules, braid-sculptures, charged with a delicate tension.