In my master’s thesis and the exhibition ANDROGYNY: JEWELLERY BEYOND GENDER, I consider the concept of androgyny through the transformation and merging of the female and male dualities. What qualities of androgyny apply to jewellery? Do materials have distinct genders? How could I connect the components to represent wholeness without simply combining the jewellery components?

I shaped my responses into a material form through digital technologies, using them to contextualise the subject. I arrived at the materials I sought: homogeneous hybrid substances — synthetically processed natural materials. Before the jewellery components could become finished works, they underwent several stages of transformation, moving between physical and digital states. In a way that echoes the logic of androgyny, digital technology operates through a ‘bodiless’ condition that simultaneously calls for physical enactment in order to test and cross its own limits.

The series FAZIS thus stages an early articulation of androgyny, in which two parts are oriented towards becoming whole. At this stage, fusion remains implicit; what is revealed instead is the formation of relations that privilege fluid transitions. While the components of FAZIS are kept in a state of separation, the process of merging is developed further in the subsequent series METANOIA, where androgyny becomes a search for the lost halves of a previously assumed whole.

Tanel Veenre, Estonian jewellery artist and designer says about this research art project:

‘Darja Popolitova’s view of androgyny is one of the most exceptional thematic representations that entered the art jewellery discourse. Exhibited works consider androgyny (not to confuse with hermaphroditism) as an idealised landscape where human relations are not poisoned with hostility or sexual frustration. The concept of gender is considered the disintegration of the wholeness that generated male and female duality.’

Estonian Academy of Arts
Tallinn 2015

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