November 2023, Part 2
There are so many reasons to purchase art jewelry…
- Celebrate that hard-earned promotion
- Honor a once-in-a-lifetime occasion
- Pay tribute to a major accomplishment
- Commemorate the beginning of a new relationship or the end of one
- Pounce on the perfect piece to round out an aspect of your collection
- Or invest in a treat for yourself—just because
Art Jewelry Forum’s international gallery supporters celebrate and exhibit art jewelry. Our monthly On Offer series allows this extensive network of international galleries to showcase extraordinary pieces personally selected to tempt and inspire you. Take a look. You’re bound to find a fantastic piece you simply can’t live without! (Please contact the gallery directly for inquiries.)
Gallery: Galerie Viceversa, Lausanne, Switzerland (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: ilona Schwippel (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Katrin Feulner
Retail price: 1’400 CHF
Katrin Feulner is a German jewelry artist who works primarily with discarded and collected steel objects, making jewelry that dissolves its previous, resistant associations and forms new ones. The work with the title Cycle is also made from found objects, but they concentrate on one form: the circle. With the repetition and the rotation of this special form, Feulner creates rhythm and balance without an obvious beginning and ending. The process of working by hand plays a central role in her pieces, because for Feulner the act of working is just as important as the result.
Gallery: Thereza Pedrosa Gallery, Asolo, Italy (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Thereza Pedrosa (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Ute Kolar
Retail price: €510
Ute Kolar is inspired by nature and its most essential forms to create works of surprising formal lightness, through a clever play of volumes and voids, light and shadow, planes and repetitions. Her creations are both poetic sculptures to wear and items to admire in and of themselves.
Gallery: Jewelers’werk Galerie, Washington, DC (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Ellen Reiben or Brandy Norris (click names for email)
Artist: Jorge Castañón
Retail price: US$720
Endearing, whimsical, heartfelt, poetic, and powerful are some of the words that describe Jorge Castañón’s work. Castañón—a bricoleur of sorts—uses found wood and other materials to create his expressive, sculptural pieces. “In my work, I combine jewelry and carpentry techniques. I assemble with delicacy many materials which I find, especially wood, small discarded pieces. They come back to have a second chance, to tell a new minimal story. I give them a new voice,” he explains. Castañón communicates the fragility of his fellow humans and the world around them and makes an urgent plea for people to examine and mend themselves and take care of each other. Like his chosen materials, Castañón sees the value in things that are weathered, broken, used, and abandoned, and the need for rescue and rebirth.
Gallery: Four Gallery, Gothenburg, Sweden (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Karin Roy Andersson (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Alexander Blank
Retail price: 1575€
Alexander Blank’s works are difficult to describe. They are funny, beautiful, scary, and often have a sting of irony. As the viewer, you feel uncertain, or maybe challenged. Or maybe both, since the two often follow each other. Well, you will just have to go for the ride—wherever it takes you.
Gallery: Ornamentum, Hudson, NY (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Stefan Friedemann (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Melanie Georgacopoulos
Retail prince: US$4,900
These stunning earrings by Melanie Georgacopoulos are a preview to the artist’s introductory exhibition at Ornamentum. In a refined twist on the classic gemstone, each facet is meticulously crafted of mother-of-pearl. Striking, precious, and refined. More images are available.
Gallery: Galeria Tereza Seabra, Lisbon, Portugal (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Tereza Seabra (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Marília Maria Mira
Retail price: €375, plus shipping
“Similarity doesn’t make equal as much as difference makes different.” Marília Maria Mira is an artist who is difficult to fit into a group, style, or current. It could be said that her work is made with her whole body and all the skills she has at the time she materializes it, her head is like a firework, and her soul like a conductor line of stimuli and impulses. Her presence in the field of jewelry is also not a linear path, but one that has been discovered and experimented with, until it has reached the maturity that is revealed today.
Gallery: Gallery Loupe, Montclair, New Jersey (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Patti Bleicher (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Luci Jockel
Retail price: US$800
Most of the pieces in this series feature honeybee wings. To construct these works, Luci Jockel devised a new medium—an amalgam of jewelry and textile—which she terms “bee wing lace.” Made from actual honeybee wings, this innovative material references the patterns and structures used in fabric lace and quilts. The work in this series pays homage to the labor performed by honeybees.
Gallery: Galeria Reverso, Lisbon, Portugal (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Paula Crespo (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Lin Cheung
Retail price: €2,800
This bracelet, Glam Rock—Jaded, explores our relationship with the things we care about and believe in, and how we deal with them through the language and materials of jewelry.
Gallery: Platina Stockholm AB, Stockholm, Sweden (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Sofia Björkman (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Janna Syvänoja
Retail price: US$1,600
Janna Syvänoja is known for her jewelry made from recycled printed paper, such as newspapers, maps, catalogs, and old books. They are rich by their past, carrying along certain places and accidental meanings. This material also gives the pieces their individual exterior and interior decoration, their ornamentation. The artist decides how the results should be, but in the end each pieces take a shape of its own. When certain formed components start to follow each other and find their rhythm in the making, the miracle happens. It is a slow, a meditative, and a very natural process. Beyond the language of the material, there is an additional reality, the information that refers to communication between people—messages and expressions. A piece of jewelry is worn for the same purpose.
Gallery: Pistachios Contemporary Art Jewelry, Chicago, IL (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: The Pistachios Team (click name for email)
Artist: Heather Guidero
Retail price: US$5,625
Heather Guidero’s work is easily identified by her use of strong shapes and movement. With each handmade link on this necklace, an arch of bright sterling silver sits high above strong rectangular frames. The three-dimensionality of this necklace creates a difference in appearance as the wearer moves and turns. The clasp on this necklace is seamlessly integrated into the design.
Gallery: Zu design, Melbourne, Australia (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Jane Bowden (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Angela Giuliani
Retail price: Individual earrings from AUS$595
The Mismatched earrings series was created by Angela Giuliani for our exhibition Considered—having been thought about carefully. With Giuliani’s individual earrings, the wearer is invited to choose just how mismatched they would like their earrings. Why not put a large circular earring with a smaller oval stud? The forms mimic the settings she makes for her pieces with gemstones, beautiful forms in their own right.
Gallery: Galerie Door, temporary pop-up in Heusden, Netherlands (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Doreen Timmers (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Maria Hees
Retail prince: €225
In recent years, there has been a transformation in Maria Hees’s work. Utility value is no longer paramount. The image and uniqueness are now more important. Stacks of thin colored layers of porcelain are rolled—and thus deformed, becoming more or less transparent—which produces a result that is not entirely predictable. Whether it becomes a brooch or a wall object, each object is unique. Maria Hees has reinvented herself, mille fois …
Gallery: Fingers Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Lisa Higgins (click name for email)
Artist: Nik Hanton
Retail price: NZ$200
Nik Hanton has created a typeface to explore the reductionist notions of “yes” and “no” using 3D printing with a plant-based filament and hand finishing. Her response to these concepts is intended to reflect on the crucial human significance associated with these terms. There are few words that are so definitive, concise, and clear in their meaning. It is her thought that these terms are at the very center-point of all human communication. Hanton completed a bachelor of applied arts, majoring in contemporary jewellery, from Whitireia NZ in 2015. She currently lives and works in Wellington, New Zealand.
Gallery: Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h, Montreal, Canada (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Noel Guyomarc’h (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Despo Sophocleous
Retail price: CAN$2,240
Time, place, memory, and movement are important themes throughout Despo Sophocleous’s practice, and fundamental to these investigations is the body. Through a practice informed by walking, documenting, and working with found materials, the artist engages directly with her surroundings. After working with planed sheets of kiln-dried wood in her previous works, Sophocleous became invested in a desire to find tools and materials that could be portable and adaptable and thus came her investigation of wood carving from found damaged or discarded tree branches collected during her daily walks. Either storm-fallen or discarded at demolition sites, these branches find continuity to their story rather than being fixed at the point where their story ends. For each specimen, Sophocleous documents the date, tree type, and geographical location of her finding, and these coordinates become the title of each resulting jewelry object.
Gallery: Baltimore Jewelry Center, Baltimore, MD (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Allison Gulick (click name for email)
Artist: Demitra Thomloudis
Retail price: US$500
Demitra Thomloudis is a studio jeweler and an associate professor at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. In her work she pushes and plays with scale, placement, materials, and form to capture facets of the places we reside, visit, and explore. Her work reveals the consideration of site within the construct of jewelry and creates the opportunity to examine aspects of place, identity, value, and material sign systems. This piece is on view at the Baltimore Jewelry Center as part of the exhibition Location Services, a three-person show featuring works by herself, Motoko Furuhashi, and Kerianne Quick.
Gallery: Museum of Craft and Design Museum Store, San Francisco, CA (click the name to link to the website)
Contact: Ken Irish (click name for email)
Artist: Saoirse Byrne
Retail price: US$300
Saoirse Byrne made this necklace of silk chiffon which she hand-dyed using Osage orange wood salvaged from a Native American bow-making class. The fabric was then splinted together and woven by hand into cordage, which was then doubled-over and woven again into cabling, creating a strong singular strand from pieces of a soft, lightweight fabric. It is long enough to wear doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled—for a variety of looks.
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