Alma Teer
The Best Jewellery A Woman Can Wear Is Her Smile
Smiling is one of the most common social reflexes of our time, a communication tool for expressing happiness. But a complexity of emotions lies behind this friendly gesture. My family of ‘smile devices’ questions the influence of history, society, social media and sexuality on the social behaviour of smiling. By forcing the wearer to smile I want to create awareness about those habits of our bodies that go unnoticed in daily life.By exploring femininity through form and material, I want to connect generations of women sharing the same universal experience of being perceived by the ‘male gaze’. Reclaiming the power over our bodies, our behaviour and our sensuality without being judged. Men passing by telling unknown women to smile. Contributing to centuries of expectations imposed upon the female body. These pieces tell the real stories that can be found behind a seemingly simple smile. Finding the balance between torture, comfort and beauty.
🙂
Ayano Koda
Skin is space, Space is skin
This work explores the sense of protection one feels within one’s body – within one’s “skin”.
When what we think of as skin – a surface layer attached to the body – is extended in three dimensions to become a space, it may reveal itself to be more complex than previously thought: more than just a border between the internal and the external.
Then it grows, overtaking the space… becoming one with what is threatening me….
I am embracing overgrowing forces
Stella Lydaki
Lingering Longing
Maybe one day my longing will become so long that I will untangle it and make a rope out of it—or a chain, a ladder—and use this to cross previously unbridgeable distances.
In this project, I research the gap between language and speech—between the abstraction that is language and the practice that is speech.
Can I translate this gap, which links the inside with the outside? This gap is the silence between words, the space of introspection, a mystery. The ethereality of this gap makes it hard to grasp—it is almost absent, nearly inexistent, wrapped in a silence that no one seems to remember how to break.
Thanks to the isolation we all experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, we all became more familiar with the inside. The outside became quieter and the inside louder. As the immediate threat of Covid-19 began to diminish, there were questions that remained in me: Where have we been directing our longing in these past years? And what will happen to the remnants of our longings after some semblance of normalcy returns? Will they all suddenly be gone? Or will they still hang about us, like invisible threads?
Weimin Zhu
Playful jewellery for the inner world
Weimin realizes that jewellery can be a special bridge between our physical bodies and our mental selves. Drawing on her long-standing interest in healing, her graduation work, Playful jewellery for the inner world, is a series of wearable jewellery pieces that encourage the wearer to move their body by inviting them to play. The movements prompted by these pieces have been selected based on research into body awareness therapy, which aims to heal one’s ‘inner world’ by strengthening their awareness of their physical body. There are two main aspects to these pieces: on the one hand, their wearability, and on the other, their playful ‘purpose’.
