ALICE CICOLINI GODDESS
The Goddess collection is inspired by the character and mythology of powerful Roman and Grecian legends, and the overlap into other forms of cultural and philosophical representation.
Alice was inspired by the way that symbols in fine art would have been instantly recognisable for the narratives they represented, in a way that only experts schooled in art history would likely now recognise. Symbolism is such a powerful force in contemporary jewellery, and as an artist with strong female clients and collaborators, Alice wanted to explore characteristics that would be meaningful and enduring.
Most representations of the Goddess are figurative, fixing the imagination on a particular archetype of body or image. Alice wanted to step away from that and explore more poetic, less fixed ways of portraying these mythical ideals of womanhood, drawing on symbolism as the most evocative way to capture these ideas.
Having spent over a decade working with engraving into gold, as the basis of creating pattern in meenakari, for this collection Alice worked with Colombian goldsmith Juan Sebastian Galan Bello to create stories in repousse 18 carat yellow gold - from working inwards to working outwards. Juan realised in gold a series of illustrations created with Charlotte Gastaut, a Parisian illustrator working with brands such as Diptique and Hermes, and her own fairytale narratives rendered in print and on silk.
ALICE INTRODUCES GODDESS
Alice met Charlotte for the first time in London when Charlotte proposed a beautiful project, to reset an important family stone as a pendant in Alice’s meenakari style. Their joy at collaboration on this piece expanded into what became Goddess where the two artists worked together responding to each other’s creative interventions.
Repousse is more regularly practiced in large scale, and for this project Juan had to create special tools to realise the intricate detail Charlotte had proposed. The rings will be created to order and in an edition of 25 per Goddess. They will be sold with a signed booklet that charts the inspirations and process of making the collections and individual pieces.
The Goddess in all her manifestations was the symbol of the unity of all life in Nature. Her power was in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hills, trees, and flowers.
- Gimbutas, Marija The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. Thames and Hudson (1974)
In her book Myth of the Goddess, Anne Baring writes “Long ago, some 20,000 years ago and more, the image of a goddess appeared across a vast expanse of land stretching from the Pyrenees to Lake Baikal in Siberia. Statues in stone, bone and ivory, tiny figures with long bodies and falling breasts, rounded motherly figures pregnant with birth, figures with signs scratched upon them - lines, triangles, zigzags, circles, nets, leaves, spirals, holes - graceful figures rising out of rock and painted with red ochre - all these have survived through the unrecorded generations of human beings who compose the history of the race.” [p.5] The connection between these representations of the goddess and the very deep flow of connection between humans and the natural world that supported their existence, speak of a society that lived by cycles - the rising and setting daily sun, the monthly waxing and waning of the moon, and the yearly orbit of the earth around the sun.
The more we study these cultures and their iconographies, the more is understood about the contribution their knowledge has made to the great technological advancements of the last century in particular; the lunar notations found on bone fragments from before the Bronze Age indicating a sophisticated knowledge system that laid the foundations for the discovery of agriculture, the calendar, astronomy, mathematics and writing. In Baring’s research this connection between man and nature was broken by the arrival in Old Europe of a culture more driven by the aspects of the warrior, of dominance over rather than existence beside the natural world and its feminine associations. We are in a time where the tension between these yin and yang visions of society are particularly high, and it has felt to me that the resurgence of interest in the narratives and mythologies of our ancient predecessors is part of a general revision of the absolute rejection of traditional knowledge that the last few centuries has represented.
As an artist who has had the privilege of working with some extraordinary, complex and vital women over the course of my career, I was inspired to create a collection that would enable clients to connect with aspects of themselves that these jewels might represent, in all their light and darkest glory.
Interested as I have always been in the oral and archetypal narratives of ancient cultures, as well as the artifacts and skills they evolved to create them, the mythologies of the Goddess seemed like a wonderful place to start to explore all the complex facets that make up character and how symbols allow us to find ourselves uniquely within these wider stories.
Find the Goddesses and their stories in Alices shop.
The Goddess in all her manifestations was the symbol of the unity of all life in Nature.