Brazilian-born Debora Bevilaqua is a maker and a contemporary jewellery artist who has studied in Portugal, Italy, and the UK. She has a background in product design and her interest in crafting techniques, narratives and materials led her to study jewellery. Her work draws inspiration from her passions and personal experiences, and it is inspired by nature, architecture, and travel. She studies MA Jewellery and Metal at the Royal College of Art, researching how to translate the topics of identity, memory, and emotions through her jewellery, using her practice to connect to her heritage, both Brazilian and Portuguese. She works through material experimentation, bringing different textures in metal and mixing different materials such as enamel, bringing an unexpected and contemporary vision to her pieces.
Debora Bevilaqua
Debora’s work questions the subject of identity and the feeling of belonging. Through personal photographs and readings on the theme of memories and nostalgia, she reimagines this distorted universe and evokes emotions using materials, photographs, and colours. Her research has been looking at ways to connect people with the embedded emotions held in the pieces, transforming an immaterial memory into something physical. Each piece can be seen as a fragment of her memories and a piece of her narrative.
Being Brazilian/Portuguese, Debora always felt she was a mix of these two cultures and had a different connection to each of them. She’s been using her practice to explore her identity and connect her to her heritage through material experimentation. She’s chosen cork as a symbol of Portugal and has been exploring the texture of this material in various forms. Using wax sheets and modelling wax she’s extracted the natural texture of cork and cast it in bronze, brass, and silver to be tested as fragments of jewellery alongside other elements such as enamel from photographs she’s taken and to which she has an emotional attachment. She decided to leave fingerprint marks on the model and made the decision to have a rough finish so it would be as natural and organic as possible. This way, the piece would have evidence of parts of the maker’s identity while being used by someone else.
Debora realised that memory and imagination are linked and can’t be separated. We never remember things exactly as they happened, but instead, we choose to remember them as we want them. Very often we use an object acting as a souvenir to evoke a voluntary memory of childhood, but this remembrance is manufactured from the material and one’s personal narrative.
Exploring her own personal narrative, Debora chose photographs that created a sense of nostalgia for her. They are from places she always used to go to when living in these cities or the view she had from her window and balcony during lockdown. These photographs have an emotion attached to them, a happy nostalgia that brings back these moments that she can always remember. The choice of having just a small detail of those moments in the jewellery means that there is a private memory that you can decide to share, or otherwise, with others. She also chose not to have perfect, clear photographs, but instead ones that were fading, scratched, and cracked in some parts of the pieces so she could play with the idea of a distorted memory and bring the imperfection and flaws that are a part of ourselves.
The combination of these different elements; texture, photographs, colours, and fingerprint marks, is what tells the narrative in this project. They are a representation of Debora’s identity and the method she used to share her memories and tell a story embedded in jewellery. Just as memories are imperfect and blurry with our imagination, her pieces follow this same concept and trajectory.
Collection of collages made digitally with the artist's personal photographs from Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon that inspired her enamel work. Being away from home brings a nostalgic feeling, so creating collages was the way she found to be transported emotionally to those places.
Medium:
Collage with photographs.
Medium:
Sterling silver, photograph and enamel pigments.
Medium:
Sterling silver, photograph and enamel pigments.
Size:
Sterling silver and enamel pigments.
Medium:
Sterling silver, photograph and enamel pigments.
Medium:
Gold plated sterling silver.
The Secret Memory necklace is made with a simple silver wire choker so the attention goes directly to the statement pendant. The textured silver piece was made using the lost wax technique from a rough fragment of cork, and is combined with a detailed on the side containing a personal photograph from the artist's hometown in Rio de Janeiro.
Medium:
Sterling silver, photograph and enamel pigments.
This necklace represents the construction of the artists's identity. Exploring her heritage, each silver piece was created from an individual slice of natural cork creating unique shapes where the artist applied her work in enamel. Whilst some of them contains personal photographs, others contains colours representing her emotions and some remains just in metal as a "blank canvas" for the constant change in our identity.
Medium:
Sterling silver, photograph and enamel pigments.
Named with a Portuguese word, "Trecho" means fragment, passage. The sterling silver cuff used the lost cast technique to create this robust and strong shape with a slight detailed texture from cork that was imprinted in wax. Through the empty spaces and holes you can sneak peek a photograph that is attached behind the bracelet, creating a soft contrast and revealing a special memory.