A/dornment - Curating Contemporary Art Jewelry is proud to announce that it will participate, as a special project, at BLOFT Vicenza exhibition.
BLOFT is conceived and directed by Gumdesign as a visual representation of a space through objects combination in a dialogue and a melting pot of experiences, emotions and life tales. Following the mission of the organization, the collaboration between A/dornment, Bloft and Gumdesign aims at taking contemporary jewelry beyond its field to raise awareness in an ever growing public, showing research and production of those artist and designers working in this area. The exhibition will be held concurrently with the famous Vicenza Oro Fair, from January 14th to February 5th, at Palazzo Valmarana Braga in Vicenza's historical center, a few steps from the Basilica Palladiana.
During the fourth stage of BLoft, and coinciding with VicenzaOro, A/dornment carried a selection of artists who work in the field of contemporary jewelry breaking the aesthetic, technical and research schemes through the use of contemporary goldsmithing techniques. A stable of female artist, each one spokesperson for a personal and original interpretation of drawing matter and metals on the body.
SUSANNA BALDACCI Susanna Baldacci graduated in goldsmith at Scuola Internazionale delle Arti dei Metalli in Florence directed by Bino Bini. She undertakes a research about jewel intended as an expression of thought, a point of view, harmony or break. In this way she moves from the idea of jewelry as a mere decorative role. Her jewels are empty forms, structures that receive something. Sometimes they appear as views from the top of wild places or micro-world to carry as good luck charm. She has always worked with silver, gold, wood, pearls and in more recent years, she has mixed (molded) these materials with colored resins. She loves vacuums, which allow throughts to roam freely. Chromatic contrasts and contrasts in shapes, material surfaces, shadows change according to viewpoints and light. She creates small sculptures, choral and poetic narratives, through the game of silver, gold, enamels and pigments composition. www.susannabaldacci.com/en
CLARA DEL PAPA Architect, urbanist, specialized in the goldsmith work's techniques. Syncretistic and eclectic personality, Italian-Venezuelan, raised and formed within the cultural and artistic South-American atmosphere, in her artwork symbols and suggestions coexist, so do tastes and smells, faraway panoramas and traditions, revisited in the antique silver, the gold and the bronze. Earthly and evocative, her work ranges from natural materials and craft making.
On this occasion she presents a new collections of rings, inspired by zen garden, which mentions the housing flower arrangement in a fun and quirky hand flourish. The body of the rings has the same color of rocks, while leaves that appear have more ice color. Some classical zen gardens have symbolism that can be easily read: it is a metaphorical journey on the river of life. www.claradelpapa.com
LAURA FORTE Jewelry and gemology training allows her to become familiar and comfortable with various nobles materials, and develop a personal technique. Over the time she devoted herself more and more in search of a personal style, unfettered by aesthetic conditioning or exclusively traditional canons. She loves being a soloist, an unconventional powerful voice and out of common expressiveness.Her jewels have clean and geometric lines, almost mentioning Leonardo for divine proportion and harmony. Sometimes Laura puts a mark of irony or a decoy to Eastern aesthetic. By balancing weights, lines, circles and spheres also develops a language of signs and archetypes, combined into a personal unconscious alphabet, pointing to deep and classic codes. The penetration of shapes one into another allows emerging, on the smooth and elegant jewelry surface, a reminder of wounds and deep scars, which symbolically recall the life expressed on the skin of the body. www.lauraforte.it
ANDRA LUPU Andra Lupu has graduated the University of Arts and Design, Cluj-Napoca, Romania with a Bachelors and a Masters degree in Design. She works with metal: silver, gold, copper and brass combined with gemstones, wood and plastic. She realizes pieces that create illusions, raise questions about their ergonomic shape, which has to be discovered. In her new collection ‘crushed’, she uses thin layers of "crushed" melted silver, to create jewelry as a metaphor for the fragility of life, relationships and feelings. Andra Lupu rips out and presses the silver coining, in devising of a new technique, a conceptual and metaphysical style enhancing the beauty of the 'rip'. www.andralupu.com/
LETIZIA MAGGIO Italian, graduated in foreign languages and literatures, she learnt the various techniques of pottery at the international school of ceramic ‘La Meridiana’ and together with important and talented ceramists as Paola Paronetto e Giovanni Cimatti. Letizia, who uses to work with ceramics and is devoted to this elegant and pure matter, engages herself in producing a new silver and gold collection, called the ' 5 noble truths ' which Adornment is pleased to present for the first time to the public at the BLoft exhibition. The body of collection consists of 5 rings, one of a kind piece, characterized by stylized and minimal forms. Made from oxidized silver, dark and marked by workmanship, they express the passage of time through those uncompleted finishing touches. Inspired by the Buddhist 4 noble truths, which are teachings all around suffering and how to stop it, the rings own the aspect of something marked by incompleteness. The fifth one strictly represents for the artist a very intimate and personal truth: suffering is also interruption, which represents of course the end of something but also a new beginning. A small alphabet of signs and symbols that invites you to open up a new vision of elegance and preciousness, able to challenge even the most popular clichés.
IZABELLA PETRUT Izabella Petrut acquired practical and theoretical skills by completing a Bachelors’ (2007) and a Masters’ (2009) degree in Design at the University of Arts and Design, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She has graduated the GJ3 Specialisation program at Alchimia, School of contemporary Jewelry, Florence, Italy (2012) with professor Ruudt Peters. At the moment she conducts her doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and she is a member of Atelier STOSSIMHIMMEL Vienna. The dark side of life is time, which flows between space and shapes, in things captured by the reality, in an attempt to get free and release form their obligations. Izabella uses different materials like wheel, lace, silver, steel, textile hardener, vinyl paint, composing a creative jewelry painted in refined colors. She loves to contaminate the preciousness of metals and stones with plastics, poor and decaying materials, creating an absolutely personal dark imaginary. The collection Here and now talks about the only thing we should experience, and yet, the most difficult thing to do. The present is a concept so hard to truly understand, full of hope, just a small spark of light in the darkness of time.
www.izabellapetrut.com
GIULIA SAVINO Giulia Savino has a Master in Contemporary Jewelry from Alchimia Jewelry School in Florence, where she was mentored by the designer Nedda El Asmar. She has a bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design from Politecnico di Milano, which was followed by a three-year program in Contemporary Jewelry at Alchimia. Most recently, her work has been at exhibitions around the world. Inspired by the city and urban elements, As "the map is not the territory" but just one of the many possible representations of reality, each jewel is a personal interpretation of the city that takes / loses its shape in the interaction with the body. www.giuliasavino.com
STENIA SCARSELLI Stenia Scarselli, after a degree in Literature and Art History at the University of Pisa, attended a course of Precious Stone Setter in Florence. She comes from an artisan family and she has been working in the field of contemporary jewelry design for 20 years. She presents a series of jewels entitle “Per piano solo” made with buttons in ebony of an old and unrecoverable piano. She defines her jewelry the antithesis of disposable. She is attracted to metal because it can be worked, welded, cut and bored. And if you're not happy you can simply melt it and start again. She uses silver and gold alongside pearls, diamonds and wood, in particular ebony. Color does not appear much except for some pieces that have enamel finishes. She loves to place humble materials alongside more precious ones. Volumes and shapes characterize her jewels with explicit references to architectural and urban spaces, building very poetic and intense landscape. www.steniagioielli.it
NICOLE SCHUSTER Nicole Schuster graduates in goldsmith at State College for Glass & Jewellery in Kaufbeuren-Neugablonz, Germany and studied Jewellery and Everyday Objects Design at the University of Design in Pforzheim, Germany. Until 2012 she worked as goldsmith assistant of Tuula Harrington in Cork, Ireland. The ring group “Transition” stands for a metaphor of the artist’s work that reflects on life, death, survival and power of different stages, illustrated on two opposites: rational construction and natural world. Her work is inspired by the city and urban elements gathered in small details and compositions. Most of the pieces are made of recycled silver. Some of them have details of gold, gemstones, acrylic or others – materials that are good to handle with in daily use. Sometimes elements are 3D printed, for certain shapes, surfaces or appealing materials. However, she creates the goldsmithing craftmanship, by what the adorable and unique character in every single piece forms. http://www.nicoleschuster.com/en/
ZETA TSERMOU Zeta Tsermou was born in Athens. She studied architecture in the National Technical University of Athens, and then got a Masters degree in the Bartlett School of Architecture of UCL in London. She worked as an architect/designer in London and Athens. While in UK she taught architectural design in Portsmouth School of Architecture. Later she studied sculpture in the School of Fine Arts in Athens. She attended various workshops and seminars in jewelry making in Athens, London (Central St. Martins) and Florence (Alchimia) and has presented her work in group and solo exhibitions. Now she works as an artist and jewelry maker in her studio in Athens. She perceives jewelry as wearable sculptures and she finds pleasure in observing and creating geometrical forms while she is also charmed by the chaotic organic shapes found in nature. The collection presented in this occasion in called Emergence. The stylization and essentiality of shapes, in the extreme cleansing, characterize the lines and volumes of her pieces, as delicate as the sign of a pencil emerging through the space. www.zetatsermou.com