Katarzyna Depa moved to the industrial region of Silesia, Poland, four years ago to study. She's young and delicate, and doesn't fit the typical archetype of a Polish miner—but she spends her days unearthing the mineral so that she can mold it into elegant, handmade jewelry. "Coal has its own nature and doesn't cooperate with me at all," she says in this short profile documentary by Michal Sikora. Coal is incredibly soft and fragile, on the hardness scale it falls somewhere between talc and gypsum. And yet, when people ask Depa why she chooses to work with a such a challenging material, she says that "coal is Polish black gold."

For more of Sikora's work, you can visit her website or Vimeo page. Depa's jewelry brand is called I Coal You, and her beautiful designs are worth perusing.