Designer name: Maya Kotelnytska

Origin: Lviv, Ukraine

Participation: Lviv Fashion Week

Catwalk show: 25 October 2009, 16.00

      Maya Kotelnytska – a jeweller, an artist, Lviv national Academy of Arts graduate, participant of international youth art festivals. Determination to work with sophisticated ideas, emphasis on how jewelry works on body, an attempt to catch and accentuate the motion of body line – the features that are traced in the designer’s projects. Maya investigates authentic jewelry traditions of different nations, as well as the most sophisticated and outstanding period in jewelry art – art nouveau, experiments with gems and metals, actively involves non-typical materials – wood, glass, porcelain, fragments of antiquarian things. Suggested collection of jewelry – is a project, deeply imbued with images and motives of the 20-30s. Brooch by Rene Lalique and George Kleemann, necklace by Karl Germann and Moris Grasshopper, black-and-white movies and photos of Vira Holodna and Marlene Dietrich – strongly inspirit the young designer. Kotelnytska proves, that creative potential of art nouveau is inexhaustible: sensuality of curved lines, spectacular asymmetry, originality of decoration incarnate feminity, which modern world lacks for.

      The designer unites patterns of silvered copper, threads of pearl, glass, feather into subtle constructions and subordinates jewelry metamorphoses and art nouveau allusions to succinct fantasy of nowadays. In the world of mass production handmade jewelry acquires particular value, every project is materialized part artist’s soul.