Seated at a well-worn bench in a Hamburg goldsmith’s atelier, apprentice Lilia Ramachandran painstakingly practiced the art of granulation for months on end. The technique, said to date back some five millennia to Sumerian goldsmiths in Mesopotamia, achieves ornate patterns through the application of minute grains of gold to a metal surface—a skill revered among craftspeople as both a technical and artistic tour de force.
Now, Ms. Ramachandran has brought her knowledge to Werkstatt—German for…