Yiota Vogli
Published: 10.06.2025
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Bio
Yiota Vogli is an artist and jeweler based in Athens, Greece. She received her PhD & Master of Fine Arts Degrees from Belgrade University of Arts and her Bachelor’s Degree in Painting, from the University of Fine Arts, Athens Greece. She has extensive experience as an art teacher in Specialized Public School for Jewelry design. She is the co author of two books for the Greek Ministry of Education. Her works are to be found in private and public collections and represented by galleries in Greece, Europe, USA and Brazil.Statement
Jewelry is like a biography. It’s a story that tells many chapters of our life. / Erin WassonThrough this presentation, you’ll be able to see the chapters of my story and the rewriting of my path from painter to jewelry artist. As a visual artist, my relationship with jewelry is bidirectional. My jewelry is influenced from my artistic research. Observation and painting require the engagement of all of our senses, thus, in my work I draw on memory and therefore on my senses. Addressing jewelry as micro-sculpture, I refer to form, material, colors and texture to conceptualize personal memories and my view of social and cultural issues into art.
By making art jewellery, artists create visual poetry. Literature and Jewellery both describe ideas, imagery, sounds or smells. They are, both, telling a story, expressing emotions, advocating ideas, examine or questioning the values of ourselves and our culture.
These works are inspired by Yiannis Ritsos’ poem Moonlight Sonata which revolves around the subject of loneliness and the alienation of the individual. Refers to the concept of time, and the emphasis placed on moonlight is of particular importance since, unlike the life-giving light of the sun that calls to action, moonlight requires reckoning and reminiscing, confronting and evaluating the past.
Our Fragile Life, 2020-ongoing
During the pandemic, creativity became, as always, my chosen way-out to maintain mental balance.
Having just a few materials available at home, I started cutting, rolling and sticking masking tape pieces together. This became a calming meditative process which brought memories of a life so different compared to what we were suddenly forced to live in.
Cutting, rolling, sticking together over and over again, turning like a story teller images, people, emotions, fear, anger, sadness and hope into colorful delicate fragile forms, supported by wired staidly structures, making jewelry stories about the desire and appreciation of simple moments in life.
Traces of Time
I have assembled an urban area suspended between reality and fantasy by mapping from above-selected buildings, old and new, squares and sidewalks of Athenas street- the oldest commercial and noisy street in the center of Athens- trying to compose documentary images made out of observation not only of the past but of the contemporary reality by presenting a collage of the area challenged by new visions, inquiring the relationship between space and identity.
Unveiled Sentiments
This collection has been for me a means to look into the inner qualities and essence of materials and objects while trying to redefine simplicity not only as an aesthetic value but also as a moral ideal intimately connected to the nature of truth.
Paying attention to nature, space, details and materials, and rediscovering forms, elements, repetition and colors, I attempt to ‘listen’ to the deeper essence of the abstract and invisible qualities of our surrounding environment and to create new associations, and a dialogue between sites and humans, structures and body.
Shielded Sentiments, 2019
Protecting our self physically is a pretty straight forward affair. Developing a keen awareness of our surroundings and habits that will avoid life-threatening situations is basic. Then there is having a plan of action when we are faced with a physical assault. Protecting our self emotionally calls for more. Some people use to avoid uncomfortable situations by metaphorically "shielding their self", and even though this mode of protection has become somewhat comfortable for them, the accompanying feelings of anger, anxiety, and repression are far from healthy. By dismantling that wall of emotional protection, we’ll start building a healthy bridge to the people and situations that we truly want in our life!
Dialogue with shadows
The antithesis of the strict framework and the organic forms depict our social behavior, our sentiments though our real self.
This work is a dialogue and an exploration of one’s personal shadow.
Shadow is a psychological term for everything we can’t see in ourselves. From our early age we adjust our behavior to gratify our needs and learn to adapt to the external world. As we grow up we condition ourselves to keep all the unaccepted parts of us outside our conscious awareness, though, we drag them ‘behind us’ all the time in our subconscious.
This repression of unwanted parts creates what psychologist Carl Jung called the personal shadow. ‘There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection’ *
* Jung, C.G. (1968). Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 12, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press
SHADOWS collection, 2016.
The embodiment of a fantasy world populated with shadows, exotic birds, grotesque demons and fairies, an exploration of the aesthetic and literary values of such creatures and the real and symbolic nature of the shadow as an image and a figure.
We are aware of a tiny fraction of the thinking process that goes on in our minds, and we can control only a tiny part of our conscious thoughts. The vast majority of our thinking efforts go on subconsciously.
Thoughts like birds will always hover high in the sky butis our responsibility to prevent the ‘birds’ from landing in our minds. Those creatures become symbolic statements and represent obsessions, our ideas and fears or projections of our subconscious. Based on this approach, they are merely symbolic representations of human psychological states.
MEMORIES collection, 2015.
As a visual artist, I transfer onto my work pictures, stimuli and sentiments, through numerous sketches, colors and forms. This material comprises the basis of my latest jewelry series, which stems from my personal memories, deals with the density of the substance.
Paper stripes, in dense or attenuated layers, create forms of multiple colors. Then, bonded and attached to silver become symbols. Symbols of past imprints and memories that have lost their actuality, since time and personal renderings - feelings, subjective readings, even mind distortions - transforms them into something open to interpretation.
Pierce the Veil collection, 2018.
Joya Barcelona 2018 represented by Popeye Loves Olive Gallery
This work is an investigation of possibilities and relationships between materials, textures and colors.
Rooms of the Mind, 2019
The brain controls all functions of the body, interprets information from the outside world through our senses, filtered by our sentiments and experiences, and embodies the essence of the mind and soul.
Rooms of the Mind, 2019
The brain controls all functions of the body, interprets information from the outside world through our senses, filtered by our sentiments and experiences, and embodies the essence of the mind and soul.
In this work series, I am exploring my own interpretations by creating ‘Rooms of the Mind’, in boxes of various shapes drawing out my thoughts, experiences and memories.
GAMES of the MIND, 2020-21
Focused on the ceiling, counting, again and again, the colorful wooden and metal tiles, trying to find some logic in their composition…The mind is empty, just numbers and shapes. -2 Basement, it is cold down here…
They say time heals all wounds, that we learn more from pain than from pleasure. That we come out stronger from a fight and that only the scars on the body remain…
Is recovering from a disease just about our body or about healing our mind?
Did I win or I am defeated? The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet. / Nikos Kazantzakis
Desires collection, 2024
We live in a world that constantly reminds us that social acceptance has its rules. Everyone has to follow the established uniformity, complying with social rules, irrational standards and vague prejudices. Striving to be ‘politically correct’, every person, somewhere, somehow, sometime will become a victim of negative comparison, will encounter racism against him/her, will feel the social burden and danger against them, and will need to just deal with it. Therefore we instinctively create physical distance from others and objects to prepare ourselves for defensive responses to potentially harmful stimuli. Let us find the courage to be ourselves, instead of trying to be the person others want us to be. Temperaments, skills, mindsets and desires consistently differentiate one person from another. Societies with an open structure are fruitful, where diversity is not just tolerated but welcomed and encouraged.
GAMES of the MIND, 2020-21
Focused on the ceiling, counting, again and again, the colorful wooden and metal tiles, trying to find some logic in their composition…The mind is empty, just numbers and shapes. -2 Basement, it is cold down here…
They say time heals all wounds, that we learn more from pain than from pleasure. That we come out stronger from a fight and that only the scars on the body remain…
Is recovering from a disease just about our body or about healing our mind?
Did I win or I am defeated? The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet. / Nikos Kazantzakis
Desires collection, 2024
We live in a world that constantly reminds us that social acceptance has its rules. Everyone has to follow the established uniformity, complying with social rules, irrational standards and vague prejudices. Striving to be ‘politically correct’, every person, somewhere, somehow, sometime will become a victim of negative comparison, will encounter racism against him/her, will feel the social burden and danger against them, and will need to just deal with it. Therefore we instinctively create physical distance from others and objects to prepare ourselves for defensive responses to potentially harmful stimuli. Let us find the courage to be ourselves, instead of trying to be the person others want us to be. Temperaments, skills, mindsets and desires consistently differentiate one person from another. Societies with an open structure are fruitful, where diversity is not just tolerated but welcomed and encouraged.
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