CRISTINA JUNQUERO JEWELRY

Jewelry artist from Chipiona, Spain, based in Barcelona. Graduated in Fine Arts in Granada, she ended her academic studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Her mother owns a small jewelry shop in Chipiona, Cádiz, since 1978, inherited from her grandfather. That made her grow up surrounded by the most traditional Andalusian jewelry, a type of jewelry charged with a deep religious symbolism; the spark that inspired her to create a new and rupturist proposal with great sense of humor. With irony, she manages to reinterpret the Andalusian religious imaginery to create jewels that function as mere ornament, breaking with the spiritual meaning of the traditional jewelry of her native land. She caricatures the religious stereotypes of amulets and medals, reinterpreting their forms, icons and details. The result is an intimate collection of jewelry that plays with tradition and modernity. All her pieces are handmade at her workshop from Barcelona. By working under local production, she personally controls each and every one of the phases of the process. She first models all the pieces in wax by hand and melts them in 18kt gold, silver or brass. When melting them in brass, she after bathes them in 18kt gold, the sacred metal, recovering the tradition of her roots. All the gold used is recycled from gold which has already been used after purifying it and making its corresponding alloy again.