It was for me a means to relax from work while keeping my hands and mind busy. Niki Stylianou interviewed by Popeye loves Olive Art Space

Was jewelry the first choice in your career?  If not, from which field do you come from and what led you to jewelry?
Jewelry was not the starting point of my professional life. Both my parents were Architects so it felt only natural to me to pursue a similar career. I initially studied Architecture/Engineering in Greece and then, I continued my studies in London learning Interior design, Communication design and Humanities, with specialization in the philosophy of space - language concepts. I lived for more than ten years in the UK working freelance in several and diverse fields of Art and Design. Then I decided to return to Greece where I founded a small Architectural Practice together with two other Architects.
Jewelry has always been part of my creative time. It was my hobby that became a passion. As I’m kind of a workaholic and a rather curious person too, I constantly pursue new challenges and change. Jewelry fed those needs of mine. It was for me a means to relax from work while keeping my hands and mind busy dreaming, searching, trying, hoping from the big scale of a building to the small scale of a wearable structure, transforming, generating new questions and giving answers.
Thus when physical/personal issues made me at some point consider a career detour, jewelry gave me the perfect way out.


What is the thing that fascinates you in what we call art jewelry?
Its multiplicity. And the freedom of expression it gives to its maker and/or wearer.


Which of your pieces made you feel that you’ve reached your greatest inspirational moment? What does it mean to you?
I believe that everything in nature is in a constant state of flux; always changing, always transforming and being transformed. Thus, everything is a work in progress. Even we - the makers, the wearers, the viewers, the critiques - are works in progress. And our impressions and opinions are intimately connected to the viewpoint from which we approach things each time. So I could not say that this piece or that project could ever reach an absolute state of perfection. I can only admit that I share “moments” with each one of my pieces; moments that I fall in love with them and moments that I even hate them.


Which of your collections will be represented by Popeye loves Olive Art Space in Joya Barcelona Art Jewellery & Objects fair this October in Spain? Tell us a few words about it.
My studies influence my work. As an architect, I never stopped being obsessed with all things I had observed, all images I had captured, all drawings I had drawn, all words I had transformed into metaphors. And as a Jewelry maker, I went on obsessing with the familiar versus the unfamiliar, with cartography and mapping, with the ever-changing points of view. I went on obsessing with observing [from below, from above]: order, disorder, rhythm, repetition, structure, deconstruction, whole, fragment, positive, negative, presence, absence, dark, light, pattern, shadow.
All my collections are informed by similar concepts: the ideas of matter and materiality, the ideas of content and container, the principle of multiplicity and transformation, and the ways all of the above contribute to the formation of space.
The pieces I will present with Popeye loves Olive Art Space in Joya Barcelona Art jewelllery and Objects this year are part of this ongoing research.