Named after Swedish botanist and zoologist, Carl Linnaeus, Veronica Lenza’s Milan-dependent Linneo brand mixes gold and porcelain onto which she has hand-painted miniature drawings of crops and animals. Getting analyzed great art and art background at Brera Academy in Milan and artwork, film and images at London’s Kingston University, the Brescia-born, self-trained jeweler collaborates with Milanese craftsmen to manufacture her one particular-off handmade parts.
A single-of-a-form Linneo gold ring with ink and gold on porcelain plate created and handcrafted by … [+]
How did you get there at this contacting? How and when did you turn into fascinated in jewelry, and when did you know you desired to be a jewelry designer?
Jewellery building, for me, is a suggests, not an conclusion in actuality, I wouldn’t say I have a vocation for this profession, but that I discovered in jewellery the context for my explorations. It all started off from my drawings I have been projecting pics on to bodies, sketching tiny scenes and subjects all around fingers, ears, wrists, legs. I never thought of those layers as divided objects from the human body, not even as different objects between them they were a discourse, a visual chant, a development of tips. I liked that they were being normally underneath my eyes, intercepting sights when I was gesturing and talking, even when distracted. Those drawings were being there to give glimpses of leisure, also when you didn’t assume about their presence. When I started off wondering of earning jewels, it experienced a useful function: a framework for my views and a way of putting on and then removing them.
What are your sources of inspiration? How are you adopting a unique tactic and mentality to jewelry making, away from classic jewellery?
My major resource of inspiration is the urgency to believe about our planet’s remarkable and astonishing prevalent heritage. I always get started from nature, an inexhaustible source of shock and feelings, deserving of all our respect. I also glance to artifacts built by prehistoric individuals: objects and own ornaments symbolizing the behaviors, discoveries and to start with sorts of spirituality, and usually possessing a symbolic conversation purpose. I’m nevertheless close to this concept. I’m a jewellery designer simply because I develop an item labeled as a jewel. Nevertheless, each jewel is portion of a full. They can rarely be separated from every other, like words. They have their this means, but they are a unitary discourse for me. The strategy of the title Linnaeus (August Strindberg wrote: “Linnaeus was in reality a poet who occurred to develop into a naturalist.”) also comes from this. The thought of cataloguing, constructing a semantics of relationships or associating by subtraction or similarity.
Linneo a single-of-a-type gold brooch with silver and ink on porcelain plate developed and handcrafted by … [+]
What is your method toward gold, and how is this mirrored in your jewellery creations?
Gold was generally employed to fill in backgrounds in paintings. As unearthly light, gold leaf was involved with the solar and at the similar time a symbol of incorruption and immutability, of everything sacred and everlasting. These qualities are tangible when you start doing work with it and discover its actual physical houses that make it a image and a make any difference of wishes. My approach is small I check out to give a shape and cut down end. In fact, I like gold’s presence: in a globe where by lightness is a promoting keyword, it resists and has an ancestral ability only by its certain body weight.
In which do you supply your gold? Is it moral or recycled gold? Is this critical to you?
I rescue jewels that are hopeless. I desire to accelerate the recapture of the that means of utilized gold by framing new stories close to it. My work does not purpose to restore a lost earlier, but instead proposes to transfer into a long run the place assets are finite. I consider a round financial system is a accountability for every person who produces clothing, merchandise or jewels. We have to minimize usage, be imaginative about how to rework what we do not use anymore and worth the history of objects and products on their own. New gold is wonderful and I use it sometimes, but I assume that the excellent of the content lies in its intrinsic capability of being recast and remolded.
Italian jeweler Veronica Lenza in the studio
What new innovative procedures or systems do you integrate in your jewelry producing, and who are the artisans you get the job done with?
I blend ceramics and gold. Each are intriguing elements in numerous techniques, but what provides me terrific gratification is the magic that is established in their union. The contrast amongst the opacity of unpolished gold and the iridescent sheen of glazed ceramic gets an all-spherical esthetic ingredient. It translates into an unprecedented marriage amongst adorned porcelain and cherished metallic. I believe I can only attain some particulars by using my palms. A thing handmade is not excellent, hence far more intriguing than a super perfect, super shiny piece, similar to numerous other people. I make a person-of-a-sort jewels.
