ABOUT THE ARTIST

Yoav Kotik, the designer of "Precious metal" jewelry line, is a graduate of the industrial design department of "Bezalel academy of art and design" in Jerusalem.

yoav kotik"I worked as an industrial designer for about 15 years. I then became partner in a startup company providing innovative health insurance for expatriates, and served as VP of Operations. After five years I retired due to excessive boredom, frustration and acute allergy to tailored suits.

After retirement I decided to experiment with interdisciplinary craft work. The only rule I maintained was that raw materials for work are not bought, but found. I simply didn't have a budget. So I drove around in a 4x4 truck searching for tree trunks and rusting interesting scrap metal, full of potential. These began stacking up in commercial quantities in my back yard. A few seconds before my wife threw me out of the house, I remembered I had received a jewelers set from my sister-in-law, who quit craft making and pursued a sweeter future designing cakes. The set was rusting away in the corner of my studio, so after it was polished and shiny I looked for a piece of metal to try it out. The first thing I found was the metal bottle cap of Goldstar beer, which incidentally, is pretty good Israeli beer. The cap was bent and a little rusty, but after a few hammers blows it straightened up and shone as new. The results overwhelmed me, and I found myself down at the local pub collecting more discarded bottle caps, and working wonders on them too. From that moment it was clear that this was the beginning of a wonderful relationship.

My works have been influenced mainly by ethnic jewelry which I saw in markets when I traveled in Kenya, in my opinion it the ability to take and nothing and make something out of it is amazing, such as with garbage. When I realized that my direction is towards jewelry design i connected to this field of action, because I had no background of jewelry or jewelry-making techniques and methods I have developed my own jewelry creation technique which turned out to be pretty similar to primitive production techniques. I chose to work metal bottle caps, they are my raw materials, I'm not sure that I chose it as much as it chose me. in any case, in materials that had already done a role in their lives has a lot of character, the challenge is to take and to give them a new life, it involves lots of research – to find out what the material can do, how he reacts to the various processes, what are his favorite techniques, including what are its limitations. When I come to develop a new item, I turn back and seek inspiration from primitive / ethnic jewelry. I declare to myself what is the direction and what it is going to be, then I develop sketches within the material, the result is a synthesis between my statement and the capabilities of the material, and I realized we are working pretty well together,

Our new line uses the 24k gold plating, I wanted to see how would a cheap material look after it is covered with gold, the result is quite amazing to me, and it's a thing I want to investigate further, beyond that there is an infinite amount of free materials that are considered by me as "hidden materials." all those materials that are not evaluated, or trivial, they are the materials who are challenging me to work, this type of jewelry is considered perhaps but certainly not one of the mainstream, the commercialized stream, I hope more and more people, especially women, will want to add such as jewelry to their wardrobe. "

Yoav was a member of the Zik group for a few years. He frequently leads Master classes in the field of sculpture and design in recycled materials in academic institutes such as the "Shenkar  cademy of design" the "Bezalel academy" and the "Wizo academy". His works were presented in galleries across Israel, the UK, the Netherland, Spain, Germany and Japan.