Winners of the Preziosa Young Design Competition 2021

Those selected are decided by a highly qualified international jury, this year composed by:
art historian Alice Rendon; jewellery historian Maria Laura La Mantia; founder of Galerie Door in the Netherlands Doreen Timmers Pijnenburg; founder of Lost in Jewellery Magazine & MydayByday Gallery in Rome Laura Helena Aureli; goldsmith artist winner of the 2017 PY edition Qiana Wang; artists Lauren Kalman and Conversation Piece (Beatrice Brovia & Nicolas Cheng), guests of the main exhibition of the Florence Jewellery Week 2022.

A selection of pieces has just been presented at the Inhorgenta jewellery fair (8 - 11 April) in Munich as a preview of the travelling exhibition also organized for this edition and accompanied by a high-quality catalog. The first stage of the exhibition will open on the occasion of the Florence Jewellery Week 2022: a 5-days event imagined and organized by LAO, dedicated to the fascinating microcosm of contemporary jewellery, that will take place from 28th April to 2nd May in different Florentine locations, including institutional spaces and galleries, among exhibitions, conferences, workshops, and live demonstrations. Then, the exhibition will reach other destinations, such as Galerie Door in the Netherlands, between 13 November and 11 December 2022, and the Hannah Gallery by Klimt02 in Barcelona, from 11 January to 3 February 2023. Subsequently it will be hosted in Padua.
 
LAO Special Prize and Inhorgenta Prize
The competition includes the awarding of two special prizes, one offered by LAO – a three-month stay in Florence as artist in residence, and the other offered by the Inhorgenta fair: a free exhibition space for the next edition of the fair.
 
This year exceptionally the two prizes went to the same candidate Charlotte Vanhoubroeck, who will be guest of LAO laboratories, having the opportunity to work on a new collection that will be presented on the occasion of the school's end-of-year exhibition.
 
Invited to give a workshop for LAO students, Vanhoubroeck proposed a project dedicated to illustrating a research method that highlights how the jewellery maker can contribute to the reconstruction of an otherwise lost historical heritage:
Much of our cultural heritage, which is safely stored away in our museums and archives, is nowadays in danger of getting silenced. Humanities and Social Sciences conduct research on this heritage, so that new historical data can be made available to the public. As an art historian, I take this work seriously. However, much archival material with (artistic) potential remains untouched. As an artist, I wanted to know how to initiate an artistic dialogue with this bygone material. Stripped of its context, this information sometimes balances on the edge of oblivion, which is a shame, because some historical documents and objects have a lot to tell us. How can the relevance of this material be brought back to people in a yet unseen way? Can we find a way to restore our interest in these almost discarded fragments of our heritage? This question has occupied me for several years already.
Thus, since 2019, I have been working on a case that helps me to develop methods by which I can demonstrate how history can guide a maker in his artistic practice, as well as how the maker can help to uncover certain historical narratives through his artistic practice. The case concerns an investigation into the sentimental jewellery of the first queen of the Belgians, Louise-Marie d'Orléans. These pieces were carefully listed in her Estate Inventory, a document kept in the State Archives of Belgium. Sadly, the pieces themselves got lost. This means that there is no visual or tangible information left to investigate. Unfortunately, the art historian has to accept this. The artist, however, can compensate for this loss and fill in these voids with her own interpretations. Thus, based on the descriptions in the Inventory, about ten of Louise's jewels have already been recreated, or as I like to say, 'reactivated', from a contemporary point of view. Via these objects, I’m constructing an alternative version of the myth of Louise-Marie d’Orléans, only so I can reintroduce this almost forgotten queen to the public.                
Le Arti Orafe is a place where innovation, research and professional craftsmanship seem to be well aligned, which intrigues me. I look forward to dedicating myself to my practice in an inspiring and professional environment like this, feeling supported by passionate fellow makers and stimulated by the beautiful historical surroundings of Florence.
/ Charlotte Vanhoubroeck


More about all the winning projects by these emerging artists, who stood out among a large group of applicants:
Xinia Guan
Xinia Guan's work, as she states, is "rooted in process."
Concentration and patience transform technical expertise into meditative practice. Her silver creations speak of a 'slow time', which allows her to delve into the geometry of shapes and patterns observed in nature. Rhythm, repetition, unity, and contrasts are the elements on which her goldsmith research is based, with the aim of giving material concreteness to the incessant flow of existence. The metal is sawn by hand, the dust diligently collected and converted into a new piece, metaphorically representing the hours spent at the goldsmith's bench and declaring a certain sensitivity towards the problem of waste in the profession. Thus, laser welding, preferred to traditional welding, allows her to decide for a more environmentally sustainable technology.
 
Anne Lahn Hornbæk Hansen
Fascinated by the cloisonné enamel technique during an exchange experience at the Glasgow School Of Art in 2017, Danish artist Anne Lahn Hornbæk Hansen decided to retrace the ancient process to translate into color her joyful illustrations that celebrate the female body in all its differences and imperfections. The criticism made in the series FEMME AND FAB is to the falsified world of filters, plasticized and glossy social media, that offers a single model to which young women end up referring to. These naked busts, to be worn as brooches, embody instead the most exuberant and proud spirit of the 'body positive' movement, proudly showing themselves hairy, flabby, decadent, and in all their precious and authentic variety.
 
Pilynn Siriphanich
The innovative material used by Thai Pilynn Siriphanich is called 'Agricultural Waste Composite' and is the outcome of Onuma Wichaikul's doctoral research, Jewellery: The Thread of Self-Sufficiency (2020), focused on the creation of an alternative and sustainable material to be used in jewelry making. That is a compound inspired by the transparency and lightness of the plastic bag, but made using natural fibers. It has involved a path punctuated with trial and error for the researcher. This series of failures - the leftovers - have become the main material of the collection, obeying the logic of upcycling, namely the creative recovery of waste. In doing so, the artist created jewels by folding the thin sheets into three-dimensional, light, and voluminous shapes.
 
Zhipeng Wang
The Chinese artist Zhipeng Wang addresses the question of the identity in jewels, as objects that symbolize specific cultural traditions and as a declaration of belonging to a certain social class. The artist wonders how these values can survive today, in a globalized world where cultural singularities collide and mix together. These signet rings are made of tea and coffee, used as allegorical representatives of Eastern and Western cultures, respectively. Just as the typology of the signet - no longer synonymous with luxury and prestige - the ritual of these drinks also has its origins in the tradition of nobility, now absorbed into the ordinariness of everyday life.
 
Charlotte Vanhoubroeck
Charlotte Vanhoubroeck, art historian and goldsmith, as part of her PhD at the PXL-MAD School of Arts in Hasselt, wanted to bring to light the character of Louise-Marie d'Orleans through the study of her inventory, which records the existence of more than a hundred jewels belonged to her. The Stilled Sentiments collection allows not only to retrace and reread an important female figure such as the first queen of Belgium, but also to reveal a whole emotional world of memories and secrets hidden behind these jewels, which contain miniature portraits, locks of hair, and engraved messages. Those pieces, reinterpreted and filtered by the sensitivity of the artist, give life to a collection that tells the spirit of a new time.