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A clutch bag built from hand-carved tiger's eye and falcon's eye, one gemstone cell at a time. One of one.
This Kleodora Queen Bee clutch combines two of the most visually arresting members of the chatoyant quartz family — tiger's eye and falcon's eye — in a single object. Its body is constructed from individually hand-carved hexagonal stone cells, each with a sculpted three-dimensional profile, set one by one into a gold-plated bronze honeycomb frame. The shifting silks of gold and blue-grey move with the light; no photograph fully captures what the stone does when held. It is a bag, and it is also a work of lapidary art of exceptional difficulty.
Tiger's eye is a pseudomorph of quartz after crocidolite — a metamorphic gemstone in which fibrous blue asbestos has been replaced by silica, preserving the parallel fibre structure that produces chatoyancy: a living band of reflected light that slides across the surface as the stone moves. Its colour, golden to warm brown, comes from iron oxide formed during the replacement process. Falcon's eye (also called hawk's eye) is the same mineral at an earlier stage of transformation, where the crocidolite fibres retain their blue-grey colour before oxidation is complete. The result is a cooler, more enigmatic stone — the same silken optical phenomenon in deep blue and grey rather than gold. Together, the two stones occupy opposite ends of the same geological process, and their pairing in a single object gives the clutch a tonal range no single stone could provide. Both register 7 on the Mohs hardness scale.
The eye stone has been considered powerful across virtually every ancient culture. In Egypt, tiger's eye was associated with the all-seeing eye of Ra and carried as a talisman of protection and clear vision. The falcon's eye specifically evokes the eye of Horus — the sacred raptor, protector of the living, whose gaze was believed to ward off harm. To wear a stone whose surface appears to watch is to carry something ancient and unsettled. The Kleodora Queen Bee form adds a second layer: the bee as sovereign emblem, the queen at the centre of the hive — authority, industry, and the feminine absolute.
Kleodora is a figure from ancient Greek mythology — a nymph whose upper body was that of a woman and whose lower body took the form of a bee. Her name derives from kleos (glory, renown) and dōron (gift): a gift worthy of fame, or fame given form. The Queen Bee clutch was conceived in her image: sovereign, precise, and irreducible to a single reading.
The Kleodora form was developed by Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio over nearly three years of research and prototyping. The bee figure is carved in wax and cast in metal. The frame is cut and shaped. Each honeycomb cell is carved individually from stone slab — not flat, but with a three-dimensional sculptural profile — and set by hand into the frame, one piece at a time. A single Kleodora clutch requires close to 500 working hours from start to finish. The precision required is extreme: every hexagon must align, fit, and hold without cracking the stone or disturbing its neighbours.
Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio is a Peruvian-born lapidary artist and the creative director of L'Aquart, an atelier specialising in sculptural objects from precious and semi-precious stones and metal. The Kleodora concept formed in Paris in 2012, where he was completing an MBA in International Luxury Brand Management. He arrived intending to understand exactly where lapidary art and fashion could converge; the freedom of that city, held deliberately at arm's length from its trends, gave him the clarity to conceive an object that had not existed before. The series was made, in his words, for collectors who already have everything.
Surround Art Gallery presents this tiger's eye and falcon's eye Kleodora as a singular work at the intersection of lapidary art, fine craft, and collecting.
Materials: Tiger's eye, falcon's eye (hand-carved honeycomb cells), gold-plated bronze frame and hardware | Construction: Approx. 500 working hours, entirely by hand
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