Alena Willroth converts polyethylene foil into delicate jewelry and shade-full objects like lampshades and costumes. Since 2013 she experiments with the material, being inspired by foil-paintings of a friend of hers. Meanwhile she continously develops procedures which facilitate the construction of sculptural forms made of foil.
Naming her label Slast, the Czech word for bliss, she chose an old-fashioned term with a baroque connotation, which is reminiscent of cantatas of Bach and Telemann, that praise the ecstasy of god. In a less pious but deeply joyfull bliss, the neck adornments of Alena Willroth enliven opulently shaped collars of the late renaissance and baroque.
The abundant luxury found in the arrangement of ruffs since the midst of the 16th century resonates in the work of Alena Willroth. At that time the bridegroom expected a skillfully stichted chemise with a crafted collar from the hands of his bride and even the magistrates canonized regulations on how precious the offering should be. The blissfully arranged collars weren‘t tolerated throughout the entire baroque period, as Max von Boehn reports in his cultural history of fashion, and the counter-reformers in Spain accused them of indulgence and forbade them.
CELESTIAL BEAUTY
Even though the conflict between ecstasy and profanity of god, that flared up as a reaction to precious jewelry and luxury objects, does not appear in Alena Willroth‘s work, she nevertheless is playing on baroque keys. She celebrates magnificent variations of historical collars, shell-necklaces and earrings.
With it, she cultivates techniques of beauty and design by combining the bygone and the contemporary in a new hybrid form. Her work is characterized by precision and perfect execution, while the selfwilled material produces strange and aberrant, downright baroque forms.
Meanwhile the astounding composition of the organic and the artificial testifies the search for something, that has never been there before. The beauty that emerges by the superposition of precision and coincidence is almost celestial and cosmic and Alena Willroth says, that she is full of humility as she felicitously succeeds in her work.
Celestial, cosmic and devine beauty is an important motif for Alena Willroth. To that she told me her version of the Chinese fairy-tale The Magic Tapestry, in which the mother of three sons wove such a perfect tapestry, that the gods took it away and copied it in heaven. One of the sons brought the tapestry back.
The mother however went blind because of the strain of weaving. As she had the tapestry back in her home, her eyesight came back too.
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