Spot the Designer - Natalia Cellini/ Italy

What did you want to be when you were a child?

 As far as I can remember, I started drawing straight away. My encounter with art was not an accident, I have always had a certain way of looking at things, a propensity to grasp the beauty of a line, of a form, and I have always had the ability and the will to let myself be penetrated by all this. An adolescence crossed by an expressive anxiety, the search for possible paths inspired by books, images, music, alternative literature and philosophy, all in the tranquillity of my room. I had a solitary adolescence which allowed me to develop sensitivity and awareness of what I wanted to do in life: I wanted to be an artist. 

When have you started creating jewelry? How did this passion come about?

After my graduation I started my real training, the artistic one. After attending a private school of decorative arts in Rome I decided to open my own studio in 1996. For several years I had run commissions of frescoes that allowed me to refine and master the pictorial technique. Until I decided I wanted to try not to subordinate the formal elements to external models. My research was that of memory, of presence, of the sediments of inner life as generative nuclei. In recent years, each work has been an inner biography that consists of earth, sand, marble dust, glue; pigments that are both the base and the body on which I engrave instead of drawing. The love for matter is the common substrate of all the expressive forms with which I have expressed myself and continue to do so. But …. there was a detour one day: I accidentally came across the raw and millennial beauty of rocks and minerals, ferrous waste of scrap from an abandoned mine area. I was fascinated by the random shapes, the chromatic and tactile traces that the materials carried. All the imperfection caused by weather and human labor was imprinted on the iron. I immediately decided that I wanted to take with me that nobility of hand-forged essential objects, the sacredness of the earth that had produced and hosted them. Hence my new research on the level of forms in jewelry production. I started to assemble flakes of dried earth and burn them in the fire, along with rocks and minerals dating back millennia. I wanted to be meticulously careful to preserve the imperfection and not to make beautiful or ‘easy’ objects. I was interested in relating the hidden aspect of the stones, what they carry with them for millennia in the secret of the underground with a hidden part of the people, the emotional part. It is because of this that my first collection, ‘Back to Beginning’, followed by another ‘Restrain me’, came about. “Nerja” is my latest collection . 

What was your first project or significant piece for you and from what point of view?

My first project was the collection called “Back to beginning”, surely… It coincided with an important phase in my life, a time when I had to start over, also in the area of formal research in my work. I felt the need to to search for a new way of expression and I found it by giving a volume and a weight in space to the shape present in my paintings. I had to make the return to my roots “tangible” so that I could start afresh. 

How do you charge your batteries? What other passions and creative interests do you have?

I honestly hardly ever need to take a break to recharge my batteries. Making art is what makes me feel good. I need that. I go to the studio every day and spend my time living the reality of personal stories, current events, art and experiences. Books, canvases of mine and of my colleagues, and objects chosen with passion are a constant stimulus not to settle for the beauty that is already around me.  I choose to take a break not to rest but to travel, to discover what I don’t know yet, to compare myself with other people and learn something new. 

What does the connection between manufacturing tradition and contemporary design mean to you?

I’ m afraid that the concept of tradition in art doesn’t exist. Particularly in goldsmithing, traditional is craftsmanship. I like to think that the first practical and psychic gesture of art occurred when a manhandling a stone for utility purposes grasped its beauty instead. This is the way I go about it, I work by juxtaposing stones and primitive materials to create more sentimental meanings. Contemporary art constantly restores what comes before tradition. Art goes back to the origin, in them lies its value of contemporaneity. Original is primitive. Thus, in my pieces I can juxtapose rocks with minimal elastic ropes, always under the banner of black, the primal color, the color of the origins. 

Is there a self-portrait piece that speaks most about you?

Yes, there is. It’s one of the first pieces I made. In this jewel, my work was only to compose intact elements on which I didn’t intervene. It represents my way of thinking; it’s as if the syntactic watermark of a text could be allowed to emerge. Here I dared to x-ray the skeleton of my proceeding in the creation of an object but more broadly in an overall aesthetic experience. 

Which material have you not yet used is a temptation and a challenge for you?

I love aesthetic inconsistencies: natural raw stones combined with technical elements and ultramodern details, asymmetrical cuts and sharp edges which are counterpointed by the minerals organic shapes, rocks dated back millennia ago. The way I assemble materials is about my relationship with the world, especially how I perceive it. This is precisely why I want to introduce some black resin inserts into my pieces. I have started making casts and casting forms, for now they are just experiments, I have to learn about the material I am using in order to master it. 

How was the pandemic period for you as a jewelry designer?

For me, as I think for each of us the pandemic period was marked by different phases: the first months of bewilderment, disbelief, inability to rationalize what was happening. Most of all it was (and it’s in part even now) characterized by the uncertainty of the future; we were faced with something that had never happened before. The only way to react to the situation was to immerse myself in work: so I created my second collection “Restrain me” . In some way it responded to the need to regain the “focus” ON the relationship that binds humans together, to draw connection (through the use and weaving ??of thick black strings) between people, connections that had been abruptly severed by pandemic. 

How do you see the future of contemporary jewelry?

“Contemporary”, “topical” and “modern” are words that have no definite meaning for me because “topical” can be outdated and “modern” can be attributed to works that aren’t topical. In this sense, the idea of time in art seems to me inappropriate. I hope that in the future goldsmithing will know how to create what has not yet been done, which in my opinion is nothing more than what has been done but forgotten… I’m thinking about the history of “grillz”, for example: a type of dental jewelry worn over the teeth. One of the first to wear this item seems to have been Eddie Plein more than 25 years ago, but it was not until 2005 that this new “fashion item” began to become popular thanks to rappers in the southern United States. It seems that this practice has very ancient origins; in fact, it’s known that as early as around 3000 B.C. the Egyptians used gold foils to correct slight imperfection in the teeth, the Maya also set jewelry between their teeth, in Africa gold grids were set as fetishes or amulets since they believed they brought gods’ luck. 

Find more about the designer Natalia Cellini