Blue Shadows by Lily Kanellopoulou. A Future Classic in Contemporary Jewellery

Sotiria Vasileiou responds to Klimt02’s invitation to professionals by sharing her Future Classics choice. The aim of this series is not to focus on contemporary jewellery already settled into an unquestioned canon, but rather to identify works whose conceptual depth holds the potential for lasting historical relevance.


I am honoured to contribute to this dialogue initiated by Klimt02. Engaging with this series proved a reflective endeavour, whilst isolating a single work from a field so rich with significant practices felt like a radical conceptual narrowing. Selecting such a focus highlights that canonical status is rarely a neutral assessment of merit; rather, artistic legitimacy is a delicate orchestration involving educational heritage and the shifting narratives of the era. To withstand this scrutiny, an object’s endurance depends not only on its intrinsic traits but also on its graceful integration within the historical landscape. This standing is preserved through constant synchronisation with cultural discourse and institutions, transforming the work into a timeless reference point validated by shared ideals of recognition, prestige, and aesthetic distinction.

To consider a Future Classic is, therefore, to remain aware that canon formation is a perpetually relational process. This reflexive scrutiny does not weaken the inquiry; on the contrary, it sharpens it, transforming our search from a pursuit of self-evident value into a conscious act of critical mediation.

In this spirit, Lily Kanellopoulou’s Blue Shadows brooch, Healing Series, occupies a compelling position. It first gained significant visibility at JOYA Barcelona Art Jewellery & Objects fair in 2019, where Kanellopoulou was distinguished with the Grand Prize for Contemporary Jewellery-JOYA-WORTH. To revisit Blue Shadows here is not to affirm an established classic but to examine the structural and thematic integrity that allows an object to resonate across shifting temporalities. 

To assess a work’s potential for historical continuity, the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) offer a particularly insightful lens. In his foundational work, Truth and Method, he suggests that meaning emerges from a ‘fusion of horizons’ between past and present [1]. A work endures, therefore, when it can seamlessly inhabit new contexts without losing its core coherence, allowing through this fluidity to sustain interpretive renewal and continually spark fresh discourse. 

Thus, through its rearticulation, a classic maintains a conscious dialogue with history rather than just reproducing inherited forms and concepts. This is particularly evident in the self-reflexive core idea of the contemporary practice, which indicates that jewellery will always be an area of re-examination by persistently questioning its own histories and genealogies.

This evolutionary perspective finds a foundational resonance in the work of art historian Gottfried Semper (1803–1879), who contends that “enduring style is the conformity of an artistic appearance with its history of generation and with all the preconditions and circumstances of its becoming” [2]. Such a classic emerges not from a static ideal, but from the active 'provisions of the material' and the technical processes that allow an object to remain a vital, materialised reference point through time. [3]


In Blue Shadows, we encounter a sophisticated echo of the secular ex-voto tradition, a lineage of objects worn for protection, memory, and invocation. By translating this ancient impulse and talismanic logic into a contemporary visual syntax which celebrates materiality, Kanellopoulou creates a vessel for the patterns and enigmas that allow an object to speak across time.

Blue itself carries a profound history, rooted in an ancient Egyptian worship of lapis lazuli as a celestial matter of protection. Long before modernist abstraction turned the hue into a purely spiritual register, ultramarine, which means ‘beyond the sea’ in Latin, anchored the divine presence in Renaissance iconography, commanding a prestige and economic value that frequently surpassed the value of gold. As Wassily Kandinsky once suggested, “…the deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite...” [4] Kanellopoulou activates these genealogies without literal reference, through her measured gesture of reinterpretation, allowing inherited symbolic concepts to speak within a contemporary medium-oriented aesthetic.

At its core, Blue Shadows demonstrates a conceptual resonance that suggests a capacity for endurance beyond its initial recognition. Its strength lies in the tension between a rigorous formal language balanced with jewellery’s talismanic and embodied inheritance and an overall effect accomplished through a distinctively contemporary style. Neither purely formalist nor overtly symbolic, the work remains open to renewed interpretation. It is this equilibrium between modern restraint and archaic resonance that enables it to generate a lasting horizon of meaning.

Blue Shadows's dynamic integrity is predominantly reliant on its formal syntax and conceptual intricacy. Composition here is handled with masterful restraint: a controlled yet fluid geometry is softened by a layered treatment of resin and chromatic hues, subtly amplified by the material and indexical traces of the making process. The colour blue functions as a profound spatial and emotional field where the ‘shadows’ exist as evocative traces.  This soft field of resin is elegantly balanced by two bronze bars, a structural anchor that acts as a 'secular frame' to localise and contrast the infinite depth of the ultramarine hue. This harmonious arrangement rearticulates a lineage that encompasses Egyptian sacred pectorals, the Aegean votive tradition, and the autonomy and purity of modernism. Within this compositional framework, patterns serve as instruments of contemporary formalism, precisely calibrating our perception of the elements and clarifying their structural presence. 

In this sense, the votive intent is not captured through representational means but offered as a proposition inviting a deeper, more personal engagement with the concepts of embodiment and repair. As art historian and author Caroline A. Jones observes, contemporary formalism suggests that “the formal is no longer a separate realm of pure aesthetic reflection; it is a mode of attention” that remains deeply rooted in ‘the sensory and the material’. [5] Blue Shadows' meaning originates from its concept and rigorous reduction, ensuring that the object does not exhaust itself in a single reading.


Lily Kanellopoulou. Brooch: Blue Shadows, 2019. Back view.
Resin, pigments, silver, bronze, stainless steel. From series: Healing. Photo by: Orestis Rovakis. 


Jewellery is a uniquely charged object whose significance rarely remains static. It exists in a state of potential movement between the intimacy of the wearer, the public sphere, the historical archive, and the space of the individual collector. A universality of resonance may emerge when a work achieves what curator and historian Glenn Adamson identifies as the modernist ideal of ‘formal self-sufficiency’, the capacity of an object to generate and sustain meaning through its own material and structural coherence. [6]

In Blue Shadows, this structural autonomy becomes the condition for interpretive depth and multilayered meaning. Because the work is grounded in an internal material logic, it is able to inhabit shifting contexts without losing coherence. While rooted in a specific cultural and artistic milieu, it articulates themes of fragility and repair that remain legible across changing horizons of reception. In addition, by establishing a physical connection between the object and the body, this threshold enables the work to function as a private site of significance. Kanellopoulou allows the brooch to operate as a modern talisman-a silent anchor for personal history and protection. The work's universality stems from its synthesis of internal material logic and restrained symbolism, making it a part of the wearer's daily life.

Ultimately, through this prism of shared experience and historical continuity, Blue Shadows exists at the intersection of art and craft, where formal autonomy and embodied function are not opposites but mutually reinforcing conditions. 


In Blue Shadows, resin functions as a medium that deliberately defies traditional hierarchies, transforming the jewel into a self-reflexive ‘object-thought’. Rather than serving as a mere substitute for preciousness, the resin acts as a transparent stratum- a substance that captures and preserves the internal life of the work. By harnessing its inherent luminosity, Kanellopoulou allows the brooch to operate as a materialised consciousness, where artistic interiority is prioritised over external decorum. This idea is particularly relevant to anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conception of materiality, in which he contends that  "...materials…are not the passive recipients of form but are the active constituents of a world-in-formation." [7]

In this sense, autonomy represents the sublimation of context into a formal coherence achieved through a thorough negotiation with matter. Nonetheless, a work’s status as a classic is often earned through a relevance that travels far beyond its initial conditions of emergence. This contemporaneity lies in the ability to perceive the shadows of one’s own time, to engage with the hidden or the overlooked rather than the obvious light of a trend. For an object to endure, it requires a certain critical lucidity. 


Ultimately, Blue Shadows manifests a symbolic and formal coherence that suggests a capacity for sustained relevance. First presented at the prestigious JOYA Barcelona Art Jewellery & Objects, the work emerged within a context of critical visibility that framed its early reception. Specific yet open, historically conscious yet formally restrained, the work invites ongoing interpretive potential. Its quietness becomes a structural strength, framing healing not as a dramatised event, but as a reflective and enduring condition. In that ongoing negotiation between object, body, and interpretation, Blue Shadows reveals the conceptual integrity required to endure.


Notes
[1]: Gadamer p. 305: 2004.
[2]: Semper p. 70: 2004.
[3]: Semper p. 70: 2004.​
[4]: Kandinsky pp.38-41:1977.
[5]: Jones p. 18: 2016.
[6]: Adamson p. 38:2013.
[7]: Ingold 14.1, p.7 : 2007.


REFERENCES 
Adamson, Glenn, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004).
Ingold, Tim. 2007. ‘Materials against Materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues, Vol. 14, Issue. 1, pp.1-16, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127, [accessed 11-02-2026].
Jones, Caroline A., ‘The "Sensory" in Sensorium’, in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, ed. by Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 1–40.
Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. by M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover Publications, 1977).
Gottfried, Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004).



Why Future Classics?
What Makes a Contemporary Jewellery Piece Become a Classic? Our aim is not to define academic criteria or impose any form of conservatism, but to collect subjective perspectives that help us understand the values and expectations shaping our field, without reducing them to fixed rules or hierarchies. By sharing these voices, we invite you to think together and open a conversation about durability, relevance, and the ways particular works contain certain patterns or enigmas that make them continue to speak over time.
 

About the author

Sotiria Vasileiou is a visual artist and jewellery maker with an academic background in art history. She holds a BA and MA in Art History from the Open University UK. Her skill set includes traditional and modern artistic practices, with a particular area of research on 19th-century fashion and crafts and, more recently, contemporary art and crafts. She has a Certificate from the Technical School of Goldsmiths in Athens and has apprenticed next to several prominent Greek goldsmiths. Her practice entails an exploration of materials, which she transforms and synthesises through artisanal work and contemporary design. She employs a multifaceted method that includes art history, fashion, material culture, and jewellery history to explore topics of identity, experience, value, and aesthetics. She has also contributed to the local art scene in her hometown of Kalamata by creating exhibition catalogues.

Mail: info@sotiriavasileiou.com
Website: https://info@sotiriavasileiou.com/
Instagram: @sotiria_vasileiou