The jewellery as a sculpture.

A sculptural constructions that conquers the body deliberately. AIESTANKONA jewellery are wearable sculptures.

Heavy jewellery but well-weighted.

To feel its weight is the hidden pleasure.

In an increasingly digitised and robotised world,

in an era where perfection reigns, digital surpasses material reality and the prevalence of the human touch has diminished,

AIESTANKONA takes technique to the limit and transforms gold into a malleable state in which it responds to human breath.

AIESTANKONA is a contemporary jewellery brand created in 2007 by Ainhoa Estankona, designer and jewellery maker.

AI ESTANKONA works alone because the creative touch can only be hers. That is what makes the jewellery unique.

AIESTANKONA devotes all the time necessary to each piece of jewellery. She crafts her jewellery herself, one by one, by hand, in her workshop in Bilbao, using conflict-free and traceable gold and precious stones.

AIESTANKONA produces only a few pieces of jewellery each year. These are mainly exclusive, customised pieces that are unique in the world. And, exceptionally, very limited editions.

AIESTANKONA works in this way because it allows it to get to know and establish a personal relationship with the customer, based on trust and absolute discretion.

AIESTANKONA makes unique pieces that are born of intuition and unexpected discoveries in the manufacturing process.

AIESTANKONA lets chaos and intuition act. It experiments with the tension that arises from the clash between control and chance that sets imagination, emotions, feelings and thoughts in motion.

AIESTANKONA seeks beauty in imperfection and irregularity.

AIESTANKONA understands jewellery pieces as a free artistic expression in which it explores the synthesis of form, the condensation of expression and the conciseness of style.

AIESTANKONA finds inspiration in nature, art and the artistic expressions of primitive, prehistoric and ancient civilisations. His forms are organic, abstract and archaic.

AIESTANKONA is a project that respects people and the environment.

"I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense.

Not I. 

I want an invented truth." 

Clarice Lispector, "Água Viva"

A BIT OF CURRICULUM. 

Ainhoa Estankona graduated in Law at the prestigious University of Deusto, Bilbao.

In the following years, she worked as a lawyer at EITB, the Basque television and radio group, in the commercial law department, specifically in the field of intellectual property rights.

After those years, she wanted to go one step further and try to find a personal language, something that was only possible by setting up her own business, taking full responsibility for her work.

Fascinated by art, she decided to change. She moved to Italy and, following her passion, began her career as a jeweller.

In Florence, she attended the “Le Arti Orafe” goldsmith school for three years, where she learned traditional and contemporary goldsmithing techniques and obtained her Goldsmith Diploma.

This was followed by years of work as an apprentice to various jewelers and in several jewelry workshops in Florence and other Italian cities.

In order to find and give voice to a personal language, in 2007, while still living and working in Italy, she created her own brand, AIESTANKONA, and tooke on the responsibility of setting up a company. Goldsmithing became her instrument of artistic expression.

IN THE WORKSHOP. HANDMADE.

What it is like to immerse oneself in the daily creative work.

THE WAVES. VIRGINIA WOOLF.

"Tomorrow I will dress slowly;

I will waste time talking;

I will smell a red rose;

I will lightly cross the veranda (moving as if I had a basket of eggs on my head), light a cigarette, put my writing-board on my lap;

and I will dive, like a diver, very cautiously, into the last sentence I wrote yesterday.

Then, after perhaps 20 minutes, I will see a light in the depths of the sea, and I will sneak up on it

... for our sentences are only approximations, a net cast over pearls of the sea which may vanish;

and which, when brought back to the surface, will be quite different from what

I saw underwater.”

THE CRAFT OF JEWELLERY MAKING: consists of a combination of traditional and contemporary craft techniques, avant-garde design, meticulous, obsessive attention to detail and a touch of glamour.

I concentrate, withdrawn in my studio, on persevering and silent work.

When I am working, I like to have TIME to lose myself as many times as necessary, to feel anxious, to find myself.

I want to allow myself to THINK about each project. If you have an idea that you like and want to develop, time should not be the deciding factor in determining how much time you devote to it. You cannot interrupt that process of REFLECTION; you have to be able to see it through to the end.

But the creation takes place during the working process, which is a consequence of the SLOW TIMES that research allows.

It is a search, it is a CONQUEST OF PLASTIC EXPRESSION without which every good idea is useless. It is a search for something that is invisible to the intellect and obvious to intuition. You are looking for something you don't know what it is, you can only solve it for yourself. This is a overwhelming situation. Also a challenge.

The essence of each piece is an IDEA. I get my IDEAS while working.

There is a blind, unformed IDEA. There are preliminary sketches.

Although the origin of the creative process is intellectual, since I work from preliminary sketches, I let INTUITION and CHANCE give the object its final form.

The original idea is transmuted as I work with my hands, due to my careful and attentive perception of CHAOS and INTUITION.

AESTHETIC VOCABULARY AND STYLE.

Combining thought and work -

as if it were a single poetic act.

Oteiza.

I study and closely follow aesthetic and artistic trends, allowing them to influence me so that I can interpret them in my own way.

IMAGINATION is my reality. Imagination, fuelled by new sensations, expands and seeks a language with which to narrate and give meaning to the experience.

My STYLE is born of creative freedom, of my own WAY OF WATCHING and a series of feelings that I aspire to translate: it is SENSITIVE COMMUNICATION.

My motivation is AESTHETICS. In my creations I look for BEAUTY.

I recognize beauty in IMPERFECTION.

I believe in the fundamental uncontrollable action of CHANCE. The peculiarities or anomalies that arise during the design and manufacturing process that give elegance and uniqueness to the object.

True beauty is always MADE BY HAND.

Doing things by hand means going slower. TAKING TIME is always unpredictable and chaotic.

Working by hand allows you to TAKE YOUR TIME, SLOW DOWN, LISTEN TO YOUR INTUITION.

Doing things by hand and TAKING TIME leaves room for CHAOS: From this arise IMPERFECTION and ERROR; that is, the unique and unrepeatable singularity that is unknown to intellect and reason.

TIME and CHANCE shape matter and bring forth a beauty so rapturous and moving that it could never have been intentionally created. Which is exactly the law of life; protecting life from artificiality and seriality.

I seek to give value to the VULNERABILITY OF MATTER. a perishable, organic, vibrant look. Vulnerable to the way it is treated, to the effects of time - to life passing by.

I detest the aesthetics of the ancient Greek ideals based on perfect symmetries and proportions. I consider it an insensitive and inhuman ideal of beauty.

Perfect materiality implies the control of nature by technology; the adaptation of the person to the machine; forms are geometric, precise, with sharply defined edges. The materials are artificial and super-polished and end up needing maintenance.