February 10, 2020

BARBARA UDERZO, Italy

Italian jewellery designer Barbara Uderzo defines her work in the balance between art and design.
“My work aims to create objects to wear. They are mainly the result of intuitions and ideas that I realize with specific skills acquired over years of experience in the jewellery industry.”
Cooperating with companies working in the field of precious objects has given her concreteness and rules to make jewelry taking into account different aspects such as weight, size, balance and ergonomics for each type of jewellery.
Barbara is attentive to contemporary aspects, ranging from artisan techniques to industrial technologies, she has carried out an in-depth research on different, precious and alternative materials, not only metals but also wood, plastic, paper, wax and edible substances such as chocolate, ice and snow.
The “adventure” with plastics has accompanied her artistic career since 1992: the Blob ring collection, initiated in fact as a collection of rings, has been enriched with brooches, necklaces and earrings, and has undergone an evolution towards more complex forms over time.
“Nature is more and more a source of inspiration because it is a place of well-being in my life; even the work with plastics – synthetic materials and by definition in antithesis with the natural world – can be traced back to a vital reality that I am exploring through shapes, colours and themes.

I have a greater awareness in the use of recycled plastic materials, which are non-biodegradable in any case, because the requirement of jewels is durability.

The introduction of recycled plastics is also an enjoyable discovery in the transformation, for example, of a used marker pen, a fragment of a shampoo bottle or something else that becomes an integral part of my jewels. And in this case, from a chromatic point of view, the nuances are infinite and unrepeatable.”

In this collection, besides the attention to shapes and colours and the experimental use of materials and techniques in the working of plastics, the focus is on creation of pop-surreal stories arised by linking characters and elements immersed in a colourful sea.

* The title of the collection, Blob, comes from a movie of the Fifties that has become a cult movie for science fiction lovers: “Blob, the fluid that kills”. The main character of the movie is in fact a strawberry-coloured jelly which invades the Earth and swallows everything and everyone it finds on its way.

www.uderzo-designer.it