CGD

Silver and gilded pendants, earrings and rings duplicate virtual drawings generated as a "by-product" by the Swype application, which is commonly used, beside other things, to speed up written online conversation. The sweep of a finger on a touchscreen turns abstract lines into a concrete word. The designer transforms the patterns via 3D printing into wax models, then casts them manually and either adjusts or polishes them to the form of the final jewels. This is the formal aspect of Eliška Lhotská's latest collection. The aspect of contents touches upon the state of mind outside virtual reality and is a personal report on the omnipresence and illusiveness of virtual reality and the permeability of its boundaries. An excerpt from Eliška's authorial text speaks for itself: "Your alabaster face reflects the moonshine, your eyes burn from the blue light of the display. Pins and needles in your right hand, dilated pupils; you do not perceive anything but the constant rattle of your keyboard. A rose is as perfect as its red color which absorbs you. You want to touch it and it is drawing nearer with your every touch, and yet it is still so distant. A piercing pain in your right hand, a cramp like a thorn wakes you up to reality. The blue light falls and fades. A crack, a slash of the present on your perfect world. What was passing you is offline now. The Spirit Offline is a state of mind. (...) A virtual world. It surrounds us. Where does it begin and where does it end? Concealed behind the mask of perfection, everything real is forgotten. The Internet, the freedom catching us in its net. It forces us to love delusion, to live the lives of others and to honestly hate." One of the words Eliška selected for her collection is QWERTY; others are identity, present, my mind, gold, vision, fire, virtual reality, I am a bird, rose, teleport, year, community, bread, together, reality is comfort, mountains... To her, working with this system of signs is a possibility to create an endless array of generated words and sentences, and thus also an unlimited number of design forms and meanings.

Danica Kovářová

In addition to designing original conceptual jewellery, Eliška Lhotská supports other designers of her generation as curator and organiser of the Železný Brod jewellery festival, co-organiser of Pecha Kucha Night in Železný Brod and founder and organiser of the "seš-lost?" festival for art school students. She is one of four jewellery designers at the Prague- based Září jewellery gallery where she works as a curator. Her latest project is the shared showroom Koncept Story in Holešovice, Prague. Like her parents, Eliška studied at the High School of Applied Arts for Glassmaking in Železný Brod. She studied jewellery design with V. K. Novák in Pilsen. She also studied new media and graduated from the S+M+L_XL jewellery studio led by Karol Weisslechner at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. The themes which Eliška explores in her jewellery designs include traditions, home, family and timelessness. As with other designers associated with the Září gallery, she does not try to make her designs conventionally attractive. Experimenting with material and form, she contradicts standard notions of what jewellery should look like. New Archeology is a collection that refines her previous collection, Pomník. The initial impulse for the collection came out of a study trip she made to Poland, which is a very religious country. Concentrating on the themes of love, family and shared values, she was inspired by bread as the symbol of the body of Christ. New Archeology is an original collection of brooches and necklaces, complemented by a set of silver jewellery in various finishes. A bread crumb becomes a historic cast to be forgotten one day.

Veronika Ruppert