2022. 02. 16. | Design

Getting closer to ourselves – Zsófia Gizella Biró’s self-awareness jewelleries

Zsófia Gizella Biró reflects on her own self-awareness journey through her jewelleries. The selected themes are always based on issues in her own life. When it comes to the final items though, she is only present as an external observer, and this way gives room for our own path finding journey. Her latest series, ‘Archetypes’, presenting various female personality types, was finished this summer.

What drove you to capture the chapters of your own self-awareness journey in your jewellery?

I concluded after a personal crisis that I need help from a mental health specialist. I hit rock bottom and was only able to resolve my problems by learning to make sense of my inner processes, asking myself ‘Why do I feel the way I do?’. I’m an analytical type in the first place. As a designer I’m always focused on finding a solution, and so I just integrated the self-awareness process into the creative process.

You drew inspiration from self-awareness for your creative work, but was the opposite also true? Did your creative work help you deal with your issues on a deeper level?

This is a romantic notion, and despite sounding logical, not very realistic. All I can say is that after each series I felt I managed to get the issue entirely out of my system and close it.

Beyond your own experience, do you have another purpose with creating works in this field?

Jewellery as a medium is perfect for forging connections, sparking discussions, even about nowadays taboo subjects such as seeing a therapist In addition, what I want to achieve with my jewellery is for people who wear them to find themselves in them rather than search for my interpretation.

In your latest series ‘Archetypes’ the focus has shifted to femininity. Did you deliberately choose this as your next stepping stone?

Essentially, I also owe this theme to the conversations I had with my therapist. For a long time I didn’t understand why my personality goes throw cyclical changes. Sometimes my own reaction to things take me by surprise. My therapist advised me to look up archetypes, which, according to Carl G. Jung are incidentally both male and female, and though I’m not at all the spiritual type, I almost immediately recognised a few in myself, and they eventually helped a lot.

If the archetypes are both female and male, how come your jewelleries only represent female types, and which ones do you feel closest to?

I approached the subject from my own perspective, hence the focus on femininity. The different types reflect the many roles a woman needs to fill these days, and no wonder my personality exhibits several of these. The combative disposition of the amazon, the sensitive temperament of the mistress, and the loving and sometimes excessive care of the mother are all in there. In addition, the matriarch is also a dominant part of me, since I find it difficult to relinquish control. I think everyone can find the ones that fit, whether more of them or just one for each specific life situation, but once that’s settled, they might give meaning to hitherto incomprehensible moments.