Sieraad international art fair_Amsterdam 2017 (November)

exhibitions
Written By Evzo Jewellery

Initiation is a participatory procedure on discovering the secret of creativity.

Eight jewellery artists and designers visited Athens between June - September 2017 for an unusual Artist Residency: to discover whether the Greek tradition of jewellery and ornament - its motifs, designs and concepts - would still make sense to a contemporary jewellery maker striving for perfection in the highly competitive international market.

Greek jewellery speaks of life and death, of magic symbols to protect against evil or to achieve good luck and fortune, of a society combining pure reason with piety, of a faith viewing the seen and the unseen world as one united cosmos.

During the months of the residency, we visited the most important sites where Greek democracy and spirituality developed hand in hand. The title of the show refers to the initiation of mystics in a fearless attitude towards life and death. The secret to bliss was revealed during the holiest ceremony of the ancient world which took place once a year in Eleusina near Athens.
Today Eleusina is an industrial town with high unemployment and heavy pollution; few things remind visitors of its glorious past - at first sight. However, for the ones seeing beyond the obvious, Eleusina can be the challenge to dive inside one's own unconscious, the source of all secrets and creativity!

Like the ancient initiates had to search for the message of truth in the performance and spells of the hierophant, the eight participants of Initiation 2017 Sieraad dug through their thirst for knowledge and found inside themselves the passage leading to art excellence.

Enjoy the jewellery of this discovery!
Loukia Richards & Christoph Ziegler

Evzo Jewellery

Evgenia Ζoidaki lives and works in Greece. In 2003 she graduated from the Mokume School of Higher Education in Athens, where she studied design and crafting of handmade and mass-produced jewellery.

Since 2015 she runs her own studio, Evzo, where she creates jewellery made of gold, silver, gemstones, enamel and synthetic materials.

Her creations are inspired by everything that surrounds and affects her, from ancient art to whatever captures the eye in modern cities where she travels. She has shown her work in group exhibitions and as an individual artist in Europe and the USA.

She has been a Silver- and Gold-smithery instructor for Handmade and Mass-Produced Jewellery since 2017.

The studio’s name, Εvzo, was formed using the first letters of her full name, Evgenia Zoidaki, and is a reference to the ancient Greek term εὖ ζῆν: εὖ means “well” and ζῆν denotes “survival”, ”life”. For ancient Greeks, εὖ ζῆν represented the ultimate good: the art of living well. It entails achieving physical and mental health and leads to the improvement of a person’s quality of life in all areas, allowing them to reach the state of happiness.

https://www.evzojewellery.com
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Contemporary greek jewelry 2017_The Barking Cat Brussels (May)