"Skin on Skin"

Solo contemporary jewellery exhibition by Christina Karakalpaki

The architectural studies of the designer have given her the technical and aesthetical knowledge to balance between the large and the small scale agility.

Creating jewellery is like working on a small-scale architectural project. The important difference that attracts her is the absolute freedom of personal expression, the ability to have control on what she “construct”. 

She is very interested in stretching the boundaries of materials and the various textures that can be achieved on different surfaces. Characteristic of her work is the strict geometric compositions, the combination of contradictory elements and the usage of certain patterns or forms in repetition. She is truly motivated by the notion of giving multiple functions in one piece and she is trying to create jewellery that give that kind of choice to their user when possible. Her architectural nature often drives her to deconstruct and rearrange the elements she have in front of her into new compositions, new images that differ from their former self.

What is really important to her is that my work has aesthetic integrity, consistency and purity in its structure. Her aim is to create jewellery that play an important role in complementing the body of their bearer, artifacts with utility and cultural value for the people who choose to own them, something that her try to achieve with constant experimentation and persistence.

The Skin on Skin collection is about trying to handle a material that at least seems to her very intimate and sympathetic to the skin. The fact that it is so supple gives her inspiration to experiment with their styles and combinations on many levels. She have used various thicknesses and qualities of leather, the surfaces are sometimes smooth and sometimes embossed, sometimes painted in the hand and sometimes printed with coloured film. With the soft texture and lightness of the skin, one feels that what he wears follows "discreetly", no matter how morphologically eccentric it may be.