Jane Sarginson trained in the 1970s at Loughborough College of Art and Design and at the Royal College of Art. In 1980 she established her own studio in London, and she has enjoyed 35 years as a highly successful jeweller creating one-off and small edition pieces in precious materials. She has exhibited widely and was one of the few contemporary jewellers included in the V&A’s ‘Pearls’ exhibition in 2013. Pearls have been central to Sarginson’s work as a jeweller, or, in her own words, ‘the oyster has been my world’. Her designs show her fascination with the variety of shapes, colours and lustres of pearls, which she carefully places around a gold or silver framework.

This design relates to Jane Sarginson's ‘Starburst’ brooch, a version of which is also in the V&A (M.63-2014). It is an early design from 1998, showing Sarginson’s design process at the beginning of the period at which she began to design the ‘Starburst’, which she has since produced in various forms. The drawing shows the process by which Sarginson worked out the original form of ‘Starburst’. It shows her experiments with placing pearls along central axes and how she developed the spacing between pearls, a feature which has since characterised her work.