Aline Kokinopoulos & Helen Wyatt Exchange Tcje#3

Helen Wyatt

United Kingdom

Aline and I had shared our love of nature and also our

interest in architectural forms. Consequently, I planned to make a brooch that would communicate these interests through the unique qualities of the Australian landscape.

I travelled to Carnavon Gorge in the Central Highlands of Queensland and became inspired by the eroded stone and ancient plants that define the area. It is Aboriginal land and has been a spiritual site for the teaching of culture for generations.

Visitors walk along the floor of the gorge but can take trails off to amazing caves , waterfalls and rock art. One trail takes the traveller up a series of ladders twenty metres high and then through a narrow pass that opens into a natural ‘amphitheatre’. The amphitheatre is really a sinkhole with enormously tall sides. Plants grow above and over the hole that allows shafts of lift to enter deep below revealing moss and water.

In my piece I tried to capture the unique qualities and relationships of this sacred place. To do this I combined different metals (silver, brass and copper) together and manipulated them expressively to capture the rich colours, textures and silhouettes that I encountered while standing at the bottom of the space and looking up to the sky. 

Aline Kokinopoulos

France

This year, my jewelry exchange was with an Australian jeweler Helen Wyatt .

We decided to make a brooch -same kind of jewells …

I decided to send her a piece of my area the south of France, and also my theme of work … I work around the sea, the architecture and the nature .

A brooch like a boat with drift wood, silver, glass and crystal .

A landscape, a view like a shadow of the city of Marseille; the houses, the nature and the fishes.

I wanted to make some colours, then I cut some muranese murrine to make the house and I enameled a few fishes ..

I found this idea to make a brooch like a boat and to send it to the other side of the earth was funny … The long travel of the jewells .