FLORILEGIUM 2020

FLORILEGIUM 2020

This year, in the absence of any “real” Christmas exhibitions, I have collected my favourite pieces in a digital FLORILEGIUM to browse and explore. It is reminiscent of medieval florilegia, where poetic snippets and images where curated and collected into new compositions.

Written in English.

This year, in the absence of any “real” Christmas exhibitions, I have collected my favourite pieces in a digital FLORILEGIUM to browse and explore. It is reminiscent of medieval florilegia, where poetic snippets and images where curated and collected into new compositions.

Join me on a stroll through these past seasons, measured in the greening and browning of things, and populated with surprising encounters, botanical dreams and an eternal yearning for the perfect garden.

 This collection is designed to celebrate human elegance with an edge of joyful eccentricity. Every jewellery piece is uniquely hand-crafted and one-of-a-kind. Combined with precious metals, pearls and unusual gemstones, these botanical treasures look as if they have been gathered on a dream-like journey to that internal imaginary garden.

Here is a sneak peak; the entire collection is made up of twenty-five carefully selected treasures. If you wish to view the entire document, please contact me at info@norakovats.com.

Poetic Fantasy on Lost Gardens and Being Human

 Below is a poetic meandering of thoughts, written as an artist statement to accompany my newest series of brooches titles “Memorabilia”.

Memorabilia I. 2020. Brooch. Sterling silver (blackened), enamel on copper, steel pin, black baroque pearl. Hand sawn, constructed, enamelled.

I miss my garden.

 The last garden I had was back in 2032, that narrow walled garden at the back of our apartment. I remember walking barefoot down the broad flagstones, I remember birds hidden behind layers of foliage, and the taste of early summer radishes. I miss being separate but still part of the world in that tranquil microcosm.

 My garden was an inner sanctum that freed something in my chest, that carved out patterns of meaning for my life and the lives I touched. It allowed me to face the outside with courage. It was beauty, and perhaps unnecessary, although its unnecessariness made it an utter necessity in itself. It was order, and it was chaos, it was decay and love and frilliness, it was a glimpse of a splendid room that allows you to imagine the entire palace; it was a throbbing, ever-growing metaphor for our most precious human skill - the use of our imagination.

 It was a space where small gestures mattered, where our humanness was reflected in a personal pantheon of fragile dreams: the furriness of moss on stone, in the twisted branch of something dry, in the post-rain puddles on the garden path.

 Now that almost nothing of that mythical space remains, now that we have destroyed and scorched, wallowing in dispassionate inaction while our capacity for kindness shrivelled, while we waited, we have lost the language of imagining meaning.

 We remind ourselves of our humanity in the memories that remain, held together in the blackened bone reliquaries of that sacred garden.

Memorabilia II. 2020. Brooch. Sterling silver (blackened), enamel on copper, steel pin, black baroque pearl. Hand sawn, constructed, enamelled.

Memorabilia III. 2020. Brooch. Sterling silver (blackened), enamel on silver, steel pin, black baroque pearl. Hand sawn, constructed, enamelled.