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Jewelry Designer of the Year
Zorya
Zdeněk Vacek and Daniel Pošta alias the Zorya duo gained fame as experimenters through their avant- garde items for the Virus collection. Recently, however, they have considerably softened their work in order to prove that they have also perfectly mastered the classical craft of goldsmithing. The common feature of all their topical collections, subdivided into smaller lines, is layering, disturbing surfaces and seemingly accidental clustering of structures. The leitmotif here is asymmetry as well as contrast between "evening" and "day" models, i.e. between conspicuous pieces designed for special occasions and more simple items which can be worn anytime.
The earrings, offered singly, are perhaps the most spectacular. The simple pits can be combined with long earrings for the evening, while the latter, from the Tassel collection, are almost 30 cm long. One long earring and one pit is a model by which Zorya absolutely overwhelmed last year's Designblok. The jewellery from the Cluster collection consists of minute hematite balls of various dimensions and ruthenium-plated silver (anthracite platinum plating). Every metallic bead is threaded onto a thin silver wire, and a point weld at its end results in a miniature ball that holds everything together. The hematites are "sewn together" into clusters. By the way, a long earring with a specific fastening, which makes it appear to have grown over the auricle, for example, takes two weeks to make. A similar method was employed in the much more delicate collection Formula, combining balls of sea coral and gilded silver. The collection Graft is made of the very fragile mineral called antimonite. Its individual fragments are therefore decomposed into splinters and, in the form of a composite, glued around an earring construction of surgical steel and silver. The result is an utterly new structure, looking like a metallic stone at first sight.
The two designers have taken on new members to their team. The collections Cluster, Formula and Graft were designed in cooperation with Hana Polívková, while Dirk Wright and Klára Šumová participated in the collection of rings.
Tereza Kozlová