Ancient cultures have always fascinated people as a “faux mystery” thick fog still surrounds them thanks to those unique, sometimes rare, features and artistic evidence: architecture and arts, what a better inspiration for a jewelry collection?
Transparent Sculptural Jewelry by Spanish architect and designer Marta Roura brings us to the exotic coasts of Phoenicia and enigmatic Minoan Crete with handmade jewellery, created with selected materials recalling or connected to those cultures.
Fenicia Collection by Transparent Sculptural Jewelry tells us the history of sea people, sailors, and merchants. Fenicia Collection necklaces are multicoloured glass treads and are inspired by rich Phoenicia’s glasswork jewelry.
These pieces, necklaces and earrings, reflects lights and each one is composed by a variegated array of materials like lampwork beads looking like traditional Phoenician handmade spherical and human-headed beads, blue jade, suede, antique-alike gold beads and Roman alike coins, metals such as bronze and copper, zamac, precious handmade Murano lampwork glass beads and Swarovski crystals. But the most intriguing material is the glass composing Fenicia long necklaces: large and oblong beads in aubergine and soft lavender-toned glass with encapsulated silver leaves.
Marta Roura has crossed the Mediterranean sea and, sailing from Phoenicia coastline and heading to the West, arrived in an island; she re-discovered ancient Minoan Crete: the house of the Minotaur where silent palaces still stood with their stunning red columns.
The Akrotiri Collection features necklaces, chockers and earrings with that typical red hue: coral beads accompanied by yellow and rosé vermeil gold beads and semi-precious stones like black onyx, transparent agate, and howlite. All these pieces are handmade and their price range is 55-240€.
Marta’s passion for jewelry and ancient people comes from her previous studies as architect, interior designer and glass artist. She conveys her special love for arts, the natural world, and gemstones into her precious jewelry, totally done handmade and shipped everywhere.
Her collections have been featured in magazines and exhibited in art galleries and pop-up event as will happen again this Autumn/Winter season at the BCM Art Gallery of Barcelona.
Her creativity and taste for fashion go beyond the handmade creation itself since it seems she has some fun creating collages showing her inspiration sources and at the same time inspiring her clients. How to mix and match accessories and clothes for the perfect elegant or trendy outfit is an artistic game, if done by Marta.
Marta Roura is going to open an online store soon and at the moment all her works, as well as her inspirational collages can be admired via Facebook and Instagram.
But Phoenicia and Minoan Crete aren’t the only places revisited by Marta: she’s immersed herself into the luxury of Imperial Rome with her Perla Nova Collection; she jumped far and wide among Greece, Alexander the Great’s Empire and Rome while revoking the elegance in her Antic Tresor Collection; she’s captured the majesty of the Near East cultures and Mesopotamia with her Gold Collection.
These jewellery collections were based on a careful selection of stones and metals; the archaeological and artistic-historical inspiration joined the “experimental archaeology” with the adoption of the lost wax casting technique for the reproduction of ancient Greek and Roman coins.
The bright colours of the Ishtar gate (575 BC), the sublime beauty and linearity of the Parthenon (447-432 BC) or the hardness of a lorica squamata worn by an anonymous Roman legionary are the core of high-quality handmade pieces with a long study beyond making them unique.
In her works, I see lots of myself: passion, creativity, and curiosity for the past. Our past whispers her something and she tries and does recreate the spirit of a certain culture: sea men’s lucky pendants or the beauty of a lonely girl painted on a desert wall.
I’m sure, Transparent Sculptural Jewelry is an emotional way of living the past in the present and dreaming of fascinating lands with eyes wide open!
Valentina Chirico aka Valens
