Elo Uibokand and Tiina Rajakallio: Dark and Sweet

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Elo Uibokand, Tiina Rajakallio

Dark and Sweet

Elo Uibokand is talented contemporary jewellery artist originally from Estonia. She studied jewellery and stone object design in Saimaa University of Applied Sciences, Lappeenranta, Finland and graduated 2009. Tiina Rajakallio is a Finnish emerging jewellery artist. She got her master’s at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden in 2008. They both are living and working in Lappeenranta, Finland. “Dark and Sweet” is their first collaboration together. 

The dark side is often related to negative aspects of life. In this exhibition the darkness is necessary; it will highlight the light and sweet characteristics of our being. There are always two sides in every thing, together they’ll form a space where both is equally important and constantly in move, equally dependant on each other, so the harmony will be created. 


Elo Uibokand has been exploring the theme by emphasizing the possibility for the encounter, femininity and tenderness in the subject by the brownish natural shades of copper and the oval-like shapes, referring to a human/woman. The cat has been obviously used as a symbol for the theme. Cats may be sweet and soft and purring…and at the next moment will bite your caressing hand. So there are oval shapes, smooth and easy to touch and handle and there are cats meticulously sawn out of the metal with sharp edges, as sharp as the bite of the cat. The cat images have been scratched to the surfaces of the metal, the drawings are subtle, even intimate - one has to come closer in order to see and recognize. Here, unlike in printmaking, the plate itself is the subject together with the earrings and necklaces sometimes sawn out from the same plate. 

Tiina Rajakallio’s works are about forgetting as a part of remembering. Things get frighteningly lost and changed in our minds, there are empty spaces, black holes; moments we have no image about anymore. Rajakallio has been focusing on the aspect of catching the lost memory, using forms suggesting the handles, the vessels - abstract and concrete at the same time. The materials (mostly wood) have been treated in a different manner. Rough natural surfaces of the branches, slip surfaces carved and painted... You’ll be able to reach your memory... or it will slip away from your hands. The colour palette is delicately natural; except the deep dark ultramarine blue associated with the subconsciousness, the unknown and far away. There are necklaces and brooches to be found in Rajakallio’s series, somehow familiar and strange.