Elizabeth Callinicos: Mirror, Mirror...

Artist list

Elizabeth Callinicos

For more than 15 years now, Elizabeth Callinicos has been making jewellery with nonchalant perfectionism. Her pieces are built from austere shapes with a nearly cursory subtlety in the joinings and finishing. How the medium of jewelry functions is something Callinicos also finds important, for example, how the meaning of a jewel changes the moment its owner steps out of the house with it – the private sphere suddenly plays a role in the public arena.

Callinicos experimented for three months in the European Ceramic Work Centre in Den Bosch. Her exploration of what ceramics had to offer began with archetypical forms and archaic gestures. In the work she created there, mirrors played a dominant role. In front of a mirror, after all, everyone is aware of his or her self-image and the influence jewellery exerts on it. The mirrors implicitly return in the platinum enamels on the porcelain or literally through allusions to classical mirror forms.

Through the artist’s attention to both form and connotation, she playfully surmounts the dividing lines between the notions of jewelry, object and implement. She is able to create correlations between objects themselves and a relationship with the world of the viewer.

Ward Schrijver