Contemporary Paper Jewelry: Renata Mayumi Jewellery

It has always been a pleasure to feature origami jewelry created by Lisbon jewelry artist Renata Mayumi, and now I'm delighted to introduce her new and equally exciting collection of contemporary paper pulp jewelry.

as seen in La Moda, a Spanish fashion magazine
photographer: Orlando Goncalves

Renata used a completely different approach to create the pieces in Passing Clouds.... no folding was involved.

I invited Renata to tell us about this new work.

"As a very curious person, after finishing a Jewellery Design course in Lisbon, I kept exploring the materials and continued with my training using all sorts of jewellery techniques, but always with a special eye on paper as my main media.

I found interesting workshops at the West Dean College, an Art and Restoration College, located in Chichester, one hour from London. In the beginning of 2017, I participated as a student in Paper Week, a series of workshops focused on different approaches on paper, such as paper sculpture with Richard Sweeney, paper modelling with Debbie Wijskamp, paper embellishment with Helyne Jennings, and so on.

In the summer of 2018 I discovered a jewel in a small town in Germany, called Neuburg Summer Academy. Each year all sorts of art courses are taught, such as painting, sculpting, classical music and jewellery. I was lucky enough to have met my tutor, Barbara Schrobenhauser, who taught me the paper pulp technique and how to work with paper as a paste, transforming and modelling it into 3D shapes.

experimental piece created at Neuburg Summer Academy

Since then I have developed my aesthetic from the exact measures and geometric shapes of Mayumi Origami to the organic, textured and fluid movement of Renata Mayumi Jewellery.

Opening my mind to a more sensorial and personal journey with paper pulp gave me the assurance that I had finally discovered my language, my voice as an artist.

as seen La Moda, a Spanish fashion magazine
photographer: Orlando Goncalves 

In 2018, I launched my first collection called Passing Clouds, inspired by the haiku poems of Matsuo Bashō. It has a predominant influence of the Japanese aesthetic, mainly in the subtlety and balance of each piece. The materials used were paper pulp, pigments, linen cord, and 24K Gold Plated and Rhodium Plated Brass.

My goal for 2019 is to keep running both projects in parallel. As I'm moving to Germany soon, Mayumi Origami will have a new scenario of markets and events mainly in Leipzig, the city where I'll be living, and also in Berlin.

And for Renata Mayumi Jewellery, I have exciting news about an artistic residency in late June of this year at Papierwerk Glockenbach, a paper making studio located in Munich. And because both worlds are crossed, I'll also be running a Origami Paper Jewellery Workshop there on the 30th of June."

Renata Mayumi

Artist bio:

Born in São Paulo, Japanese descendant RenataMayumi graduated in Public Relations and worked in Cinema and Television for 10 years. In Lisbon, she found in jewellery the perfect path to combine her passion for manual work with the subtlety of Oriental aesthetics present in all her pieces. Paper revealed itself as the main material and the artist explores in a unique direction its lightness and volume through different techniques. In this way she manages to break with the tradition of the predominant use of metal in jewellery and faces paper as a truly precious material.

Renata Mayumi Jewellery is on Instagram. She can be contacted directly at either place and will continue to maintain Etsy shop Mayumi Origami.

 

 

All Things Paper is an Etsy affiliate.