Here and Now
Time, flying too fast or slipping too slow. I am always late, trying to postpone getting old, but always in a hurry to experience more of this life. Always tired, always on the road, running towards a finish-line, but permanently wanting to stop, get some sleep, smell the flowers and just breathe. The present moment seams to be always slipping away. I am looking forward to the future and I am trapped in the past. I am obsessed with time, with the spontaneity, the uniques and the irreversibility of each moment and how this can be passed on from my hands into the pieces of jewelry I make.
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A love story
This is a love story as I remember it. It is about me being the spectator of a love story that has been going on for many years. When we remember things, they are fuzzy, inaccurate, not true sometimes and not in the chronological order. We mostly remember the feelings.
By using the remains of some inline-skates (rollerblades) he used, the old-fashioned, out of style, sweat and broken, I take advantage of all the material and emotional qualities they are giving me, extracting the value from the objects (skates) and refining then by changing their state, separating it into material and emotion. I dissected the memories of this love story by taking apart the skates, some of them violently, others with care, focusing on two components: the wheals and the laces. The wheals are spinning just like love make you feel, while the laces are there to bind and combine, to boil, to tangle and make a mess.
I use only one color on each piece. The colors are the ones from the skates he had – denim blue, white, dark grey. This way the pieces are dematerialized, put in another context and joined into a new object – a piece of jewelry. The brooches were made thinking this are the jewels that stay closer to the heart and the neckpieces because they resemble the most to hugs.
These pieces of jewelry are an accumulation of feelings, memories, years that have been left behind. There is no history, just a story.
Click here to see the more art jewelry from this series.
Innocent
The “Innocent” project gives me the chance to express an issue I am very much concerned with: the abuse against animals. The plastic toys are a way of representing an innocence that can only imply the horrible things that could / might have happened. I cut the animal toys the way butchers do, whilst others I use in twisted positions. After that I melt them, creating situations that I imagine they end up in. I paint them in lively colors that are not specific to those animals and this way the first impression of the audience is of a happy piece of jewelry and only then, after a closer examination, they truly see the animal and its suffering. Most of them are hand painted so that every brush stroke I make allows me to connect with that animal and feel it’s pain. The electroformed pieces represent the animals that live in cold metal cages, while the silk represents a natural material that stands for blood (red silk) and the darkness of the night (black silk).
By creating more feminine pieces of jewelry I am trying to nurture those animals’ suffering.
Materials: plastic toys, electroformed, alpaca, silver, paint, varnish, onyx, silk, pigments, copper, gold leaf.
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We become one
It’s dark and quiet, and deep and empty. Very shy, it shows itself for a second and then it’s gone again. It makes me very curious, I want to find out more. What is it, who is it, is it important? Sometimes it is less timid and lets me see it for a bit longer, not enough to satisfy my curiosity, but long enough to make me want more. The 2nd one comes out, the 3rd one, the 4th one and the 5th, but just for a second. My curiosity then becomes obsession and I try to remember and to figure out what it was about. Then I sink in and start to give it a shape, a material and to make it real. This way I can look at it for as long as I want. With a body, it is not shy or afraid anymore. We become one.
When they come out from hiding, they are actually the ones who want to see me, they are curious about what I look like. They are a little scared of what they might find out, so they just take sneak-peaks at me. Most of the times they do this when I don’t pay attention, when I am not looking. If I see them looking at me, they immediately hide. They are so fast, sometimes I only see a shadow or a trace. Sometimes I am not even sure I saw them. But after they observe me enough, they stop being afraid of me and then we get to know each other. They show me their shape and I give it a body. We become one.
Click here to see more from this jewelry series.