Catarina Hällzon...

Catarina Hällzon
About me and my thougths about what I do...

“...The process is what keeps me going in my work. My way of getting close is often intuitive, unpredictable and based on what I feel and think in the moment. I rarely work out of a specific idea about the end result. I tend to work starting in a now where the experiences, my thoughts and feelings suddenly appear. It is an open process, constantly changing and always under construction. I am exploring everything and nothing through the power of my process and I am drawn to the undecided.

Ways of working
My thoughts, reflections and passing moments are turning into words that follow the structure of a language, philosophical journeys where the words are important. I often use Natural science trying to illustrate my thinking. This is the written part of my work, where the words can be what they are representing what they mean. It is looking at things in a bigger picture or, looking at the same picture but from another side. I look upon my ability to think/philosophise and write about what I do out of another perspective as important and specific to my method of working. They walk hand in hand with my jewellery, talking about the same thoughts but in different languages.

My thoughts, reflections and passing moments are also turned into objects with it’s own language without the frames and meanings words have. I strive to find the essence of a piece, the natural. I want my pieces to be what they are. No more but also no less, with all the openings of reflection that brings to a piece. My material, shapes and functions are most times spontaneous, asking rather then telling. I constantly collect as I go along, cataloguing my findings in my own chaos, mixing my thoughts from yesterday with what I just found. I am looking for the appreciation in a something right now, there and then. What once got me to start formulate my pieces is not relevant to the wearer/viewer, possibly interesting. To me the important part is when a piece awakes a will, a need or a feeling responding to what you have in front of you. That is where the magic happens.

Why not jewellery?
Making jewellery is not a matter of course to me; some of my pieces never make it back onto the body. But most of them do and I still wonder why? To me, the wearing of an object, a piece of jewellery is strongly connected to treasuring; it is a gesture of giving something value and appreciation. One important quality a piece of jewellery own is the quality of belonging. Belonging to a wearer as well as belonging to a story but also the momentarily belonging to each and every viewer. Another interesting aspect of jewellery is the communicative quality. There is often a telling in a piece; maybe not a readable story, like those in a book. Rather a something; there for the wearer/viewer to respond to, reflect upon and maybe even carry on… To me a piece will be its own after I make it. It will be affected over time; it will change and start to tell things I can never predict…”


Text from Catarina Hällzons website…


http://www.catarinahallzon.se/
http://www.catarinahallzon.se/eng/index.html


It was nice to meet Catarina and have a small talk about her jewellery.
We have meet before long time ago at Konstfack… I like her way of working and using everyday life material, may be a not so common everyday life material, but in the old times at the countryside they use all kind of leftovers… and that’s the same that I do myself today, but I take what we consume today in the urban society and Catarina choose to go back, dig in the nature and mix it with silver and sometimes even copper.
But the both every day life angles exist parallel here in Sweden and in many other countries too… I think that is curios… that I have shampoo cans and she has different Swedish fish and moose and pigs to work/use with.


Same, same but totally different… is it possible to say and think that way?!