Marina Callis: Art meets craftsmanship.

Three thousand years ago Anaxagoras proposed that the hand, and not the brain as we usually believe, is the primordial and distinguishing feature of our species.

Two thousand years later, in a fervent Buenos Aires that Galen could not have imagined, a young medical student revives that very premise. Marina Callis borrows 400 pesos from her sister, goes to the Once neighborhood, where centuries of textile manufacturing converge within a few blocks, and looks for stones and brightly colored threads. Almost playfully, she creates her first line of necklaces, strung and woven. Her motivation was to create cheerful, colorful, luminous, and lightweight pieces that would add beauty to the wearer.

tienda-museothyssen

Sewing as a state of calm

The manual work of sewing and folding fabrics for hours introduces a time that, at times, is suspended: a non-chronological time, where repetition becomes a state of calm to which the very act of sewing leads. Sewing is her way of inhabiting that place. An ancestral practice that, in Marina's personal history, returns to revalidate and empower itself. A matriarchy of mother, grandmother, and aunts, all linked to the textile world: sewing machines, knitting needles, wool, threads, fabrics. Knowing how to work with one's hands was natural in that environment. From there, in part, arises her self-taught training. A doctor who one day transforms into a jeweler.

tienda-museothyssen

Callis x Thyssen

Callis evolves very quickly and converges to an entirely textile language, even in the clasps and fasteners, specially designed to preserve the coherence of the project and maintain a hypoallergenic, soft, and skin-friendly texture.

In recent years, art has strongly returned to textiles. Artists like Sheila Hicks, Magdalena Abakanowicz, or Teresa Lanceta have made thread, pleat, and repetition a way of reflecting on time, the body, and memory. In this context, textiles cease to be a mere support to become a gesture, process, and volume. Callis dialogues with this tradition from a different place: not from the museum, but from the workshop, from everyday artisanal practice, where experimentation occurs with the hands.

This dialogue becomes explicit in a collaboration with the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, designing jewelry inspired by works from its permanent collection. The Mapas line works with the color palette of an untitled work by Clifford Still (1965): off-whites, whites, navy blue, and brown, with irregular edges that allude to maps and territories.

Marina Callis

48,00€
( / )

Clyford Still x Marina Callis cotton earrings

  • Still, Clyfford
  • Earrings
62,00€
( / )

Clyford Still x Marina Callis cotton brooch

  • Still, Clyfford
  • Brooch