Jewellery:
While creating handmade artisan jewelry I regard adornment as the aspect of human behavior that is guided by the effort to render our rather nuanced and elusive inner worlds obvious and sensory comprehensible. Thereby approaching jewelry as an art form, an expression of the soul motivated by aspiration to communicate and interact.
As I believe that a distinctive sensuous tactility is thread into the item through hours of work upon it I choose to work with my hands creating one of a kind handmade items. During the time I create these artifacts I emphasize the process of creation, focusing on the modalities of networks building the form. So it happens that it is not the outward shape that is accented but, it is rather the distinctive set of patterns of movement that asserts it. Exactly interlacing is what builds these works into being therefore the designs repeatedly feature that same gesture within themselves.
Throughout my works, I’m inspired by tiny traces of actions, murmurs of change, growth and decay – a certain kind of poesis that is steadily happening in the background. The constructs described herein are delicate and lightweight jet gently pliable, highlighting the beauty of impermanence. My aim here is to create subtle allusions, forms that seem to develop trough centuries – objects that are difficult to position in time. Therefore I often choose to oxidize the pieces denoting an albeit continuous nevertheless fleeting and ephemeral existence simultaneously accentuating the perpetual viridity of crystals that I sometimes embed into the jewelry.
Beside crystals I also incorporate corals, shells and pebbles, branches, roots and bones as well as sea glass and scraps of weathered metal while constructing netted carriers of silver plated copper wire for these found objects that could be envisioned as traces of feelings encountered while roaming through our inwardly-outer landscapes, if we allow ourselves to draw analogies between perceptions of ourselves and our surroundings. Here I contrast the seemingly tedious and repetitive work of a human to the proportionally inconceivable workings of nature involved in creating the world we inhabit thereby questioning our quotidian approach towards the environment.
Lena Franolić
Paintings, drawings and sculptures:
Within the scope of my artwork, I’m concerned with the permeation of the sensory with the intangible and the spiritual, as well as with interaction at the level of artist – (active) observer. I’m striving to achieve this through research of biomorphic sculptural forms in my graduation thesis Forms of Clothing as Body Extensions and during their interaction with the audience throughout the work p_32… play, in a loop that never ends in which I try to evoke the notion of autopoesis and feedback loop systems of information through an atmospheric exhibition with an interactive projection.
Uncovering the same principle during a recent painting endeavor in the manner of abstract expressionism (Transpersonal Landscapes) in which, through the technique of automatism and publication of concurrent paintings on social networks, I explore the relationship between the Self and the collective (sub)conscious, as well as the technological impact on the subject’s sensory experience of the environment. The meaning here is ambivalent and multilayered, it changes from moment to moment, depending on the perception of reality of artist and/or observer.
The theme of transience imbues all the works, manifesting through the processes of growth and decay – embodiment and dematerialization. This is most pronounced in the work Vibration of Stillness, displayed through the fragile dispersion and dissolution of form, contrasted with forms in which a continuous tension prevails, reverberating with a certain vitality and potency.
In pursuit of balance, the works are always based on the forms that precede them.
Lena Franolić