GULA

Remade in Portugal "in-utilitas", exhibition, Fundação EDP, Porto, 2015

sterling silver, gold plating, silver filings, resin, freshwater pearls and nylon thread

When hunger is gluttony

If hunger is a primary need, the pleasure caused by sugar is a luxury only explained by the excess of gluttony.

Jewelry lies between the useful object and the apparent uselessness of art and in this context, the jewel is the sugar we put upon the clothes we wear to add more flavor - to provide the useful of the luxury of beauty.

While a silver jewel is produced, garbage accumulates in the form of filings - a silver powder that resembles sand or refined sugar. If collected, it can be transformed back into silver possible to work in a sort of circular recycling. But why not integrate filings in jewelry? As if the garbage that luxury gives rise to could become the protagonist itself.

GULA, celebrating the joy of creating a beautiful object that can be worn, treats this silver filings as if they were sugar, integrating in one piece utilitarian recognizable forms and turning them into symbolic elements, decontextualized and out of scale, in a way to exalt its practical uselessness.

When worn, GULA warns about the dangers of giving in to the pure and simple pleasure, making the instrument to achieve it inaccessible - because if hunger is the symptom of a need, gluttony is perhaps a treat as necessary as the beauty that yearns to be contemplated.

GULA is a necklace composed of two pendants inspired in a cake on a doily and a spoon, in which the sugar is represented by the reuse of silver fillings.

The word gluttony derives from the Latin gula, which means esophagus, throat, gullet.

Interestingly, it is also the word for sugar in Indonesian.