Tags
Dear all,
this blog was created out of my love for contemporary jewellery and contemporary jewellery artists from around the world.
That is why I’m very proud to present to you the first (of hopefully many :-)) interviews that Contemporarty™ conducted with one of the NOI 9 artists, whose exhibition starts tomorrow here in Athens, Anastasia Kandaraki.
Name: Anastasia Kandaraki
Born: 1983 in Athens
Lives and works in: Athens, Greece
Contemporarty™: Tell us how you discovered your passion for contemporary jewellery.
Anastasia: All started as a research to find something to do in order to express myself. The passion for jewellery comes from a very young age, as my father is a goldsmith and that influenced me a lot. I started to create and to learn some basic technics in the workshop of my father. Afterwards, I decided to go to a school, here in Athens, to attend some jewellery lessons in a more professional way. But something was missing; I wanted to learn not only how to create a piece of jewellery but also how to express myself through it. At that point, I discovered Alchimia, a contemporary jewellery school in the Renaissance city of Florence. I decided to go there to discover what contemporary jewellery is. I immediately fell in love with the whole philosophy of contemporary jewellery. I had the opportunity to have very good teachers that helped me to develop myself in this field. It was a big gift for me, because I didn’t only learn how to create and to get inspired but I also got to know myself better.
C: Who or what inspires you?
A: What inspires me… I can say that life inspires me and more specifically the metamorphosis of life. The cycle of life, birth and death and birth and death…
C: How do you start creating a piece? By drawing, working directly with the material or do you have another approach?
A: It depends on the piece but I usually start directly working with the material. It is like a dialogue between me and the material. It is difficult to explain it but when I am working I am so concentrated that I “listen” to it .
C: You work a lot with bones. What attracts you to this material?
A: I work with bone because it is a hard material but at the same time soft. You can mold it, you can create interesting surfaces and colours, and also it is a natural material. Each piece has its past, it used to be alive before.
C: Which piece is the most representative of your work?
A: Each piece represents another moment of my life, but a piece that is representative of my work is “A posto cosi” (“That’s enough”), which is the end of one period and the beginning of another. It is a brooch, made by oxidised silver.
C: What is the most indispensable item in your studio?
A: The most indispensable item in my studio is my stucco, because I can cover old surfaces with it and build new ones.
C: What project are you working on now?
A: I am currently using bone as a material to my pieces. I am trying to give birth to something that dead before. I recreate forms, I colour them, I cover them with stucco and I transform them in a piece of jewellery that has a new life.
C: Contemporary jewellery is…
A: an escape from and a dive into everyday life, a search for another type of language of expression.
Thank you Anastasia for the wonderful insight in your world of creation. We are looking forward to the exhibition, which starts tomorrow!
Also, people, do not forget that if you too want to learn how to create and express yourself in the language of contemporary jewellery and live in Athens, Greece, there is only one place to do this: at Anastasia’s new seminars.
See you all at the exhibition tomorrow!