Marina Sheetikoff

Dry leaf, earring and signature
Niobium, Saffire, white gold, washi paper in the acrylic display box.
17cm x 21cm x 5cm
Year 2017


The Art of Marina Sheetikoff, This Way.

Marina Sheetikoff turns language into poetry. In her hands, jewelry shows us that true art is language submitted to poetic and conceptual crafting on several levels.

In her exhibition Por Esse Lado [This Way] held in São Paulo, in August 2017, at Galeria Alice Floriano, Sheetikoff showed a new set of works that constitute three series:  Sombrasdanoite (na floresta) [Night Shadows (in the Forest)], Frações da Natureza [Fractions of Nature] and Ponta do dia (Prumo) [Tip of the Day (Plummet)].

Visitors entering the exhibition are met by a somewhat disturbing proposition. Sheetikoff’s pieces activate a conceptual and poetic shift that leaves them disconcerted and operates a suspension of their experience of the utilitarian aspects of jewelry, not to mention its innate function as body adornment. She masterfully creates these situations in her work, drawing on strategies that have long been maturing in the course of her career. What you are looking for is what you will get, but this time she announces that it will be on the path she prompts us to take at a fork in the road: "this way", rather than the usual way. Her pieces are much more than jewels. Will visitors feel they have it woefully wrong? Or will they be blithely bewildered?

This Way is a journey, a real travel experience enhanced by memory in Night Shadows (in the Forest), a series of pieces drawing on the story of her mother’s family in exile. It resembles a sensitive self-portrait that could translateharshandsomber contexts; time and place, memory: her family’s long nights in the forest as they fled from Russia during the war. Arranged side by side, though not chronologically, we found people’s profiles, a long line of phantasmagoria that dissolves everything from the hardest of metals to the flimsiest slivers of latex tapped from Brazilian rubber tree plantations. Positive and negative, light and shadow, recollections and memories are necklaces and at the same time adornments for the body. Memory is thus actualized and externalized to be imprinted on the body, almost tattooed. But in this case, Sheetikoff’s ‘past’ is not a nightmare but a driving force impelling new decisions to be made. As in art, the risk here is a positive turning-point that activates new opportunities.

In the middle of the room, there is a large cube of marine plywood, its edgy colouring dominating as both podium and object. This opaque volume rising to meet the eye contains a collection of pieces encapsulated in small acrylic caskets annotated by tiny objects. Among them, beetles and small insects are reiterated in different situations to comprise her Sheetikoff’s series Fractions of Nature. In her own words, "these fragments were chosen to shape an alchemist’s cauldron." Ancient Egyptians, however, viewed beetles as a sacred species and as amulets representing life after death and reincarnation. Arranged side by side in a kind of scientific catalogue order, natural leaves are recrafted from their metallic duplicates to suggest a startling association with honeycombs, gemstones, bodily prostheses, or those small metallic colour-sampler plaques. Sheetikoff’s meticulous arrangement makes the natural-artificial dichotomy oscillate between poetry and rational logic using a quasi-scientific methodology for convergence between botany and zoology.

Finally, Tip of the Day (Plummet) is the piece from the exhibition that most clearly reveals the syntax of Sheetikoff’s work and her mastery overall. In this kind of abstract diagram, she announces night’s ending as the rising sun illuminates everything, giving way to the infinitely varying colors held within a sliver of natural life. Her microscopic investigation dissects the universe from the tiny tip of a leaf to evince the unconquerable logic of nature and announce an infinite life-giving force still under forest shadow.

Sheetikoff says that her works “relate to the transition from night to day, representing the cyclical and non-linear relationship of life." In her words, the idea of naming her exhibition “This Way” related to a decision made 'randomly' that may then become a determining factor, such as being in a dark forest at a fork in the path and choosing which side to take. Or yet taking one leaf from thousands of others to craft a jewel from it, or the subtle relations of form and content revealed during the process of artistic creation.

For this set of pieces, Marina Sheetikoff has combined impressive contents: personal memory, nature as artifice, nocturnal dreams, and fears; but also, the light of daybreak and yet more: technique. Subtle contrasts, cataloguing colors, materials, and shapes. Mutations from biology to zoology. Minimal and infinite; light and shadow; positive and negative. Everything is transcending and viewers live the experience of a suspension in which jewelry is elevated to the artist’s narratives and may become a children’s fairytale. Rather than a mere utilitarian logic of jewelry circulation, the artist lends a poetic logic to these pieces and viewers no longer have to ask what they are for.
 
Ana Maria Tavares
translated by Izabel  Burbridge.

Dry Herb of Grace leaves, earrings and two stones of citron quatrz
Niobium, washi paper, acrylic display box.
17cm x 21cm x 5cm
Year  2017

Silver plummet detail + Tip of The Day  (view of the exhibition).
Year 2017

Overview of the exhibition, Galery Alice Floriano, São Paulo, SP, Brazil August 2017.

Two profiles riveted are on either side of the pivoting agate stone to create an imaginary conversation.

Set of 7 rings and 2 brooches

Selected for La Frontera Exhibition at Franz Mayer Museum, Mexico City, Mexico and Velvet da Vincy Gallery , San Francisco, California, USA.

Exhibited at Casa das Rosas, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Bienal 50 years, São Paulo, Brazil
Eye brow piercing

Bienal 50 years, São Paulo, Brazil
Tongue piercing

An Eye On The Forehead 
This work questions the transformations offered by transgenic advances.
Installation view. 4 pillars, illuminated inside, each one showing one piercing. 4 Light boxes with images of faces wearing the pieces on the wall.  Bienal 50 years, São Paulo, Brazil, 2001
Photos by Fernando Laszlo

Chain Project
Idealised and curated by Marina Sheetikoff, 2013
This project brings together the work of 65 contemporary jewellers from 20 countries into one object; a chain.
This large chain, uniting them all, composed of lengths of 15 cm smaller chains made by each participating member, celebrates the diversity in materials and methods of working; each chain becomes a metaphorical link in this new larger one. The resulting piece is 12 metres long and composed of a variety of raw materials, including concrete, paper, silicone, gold, silver and organic matter.