Financial Mail - Sonja Zytkow

Article - January 18, 2008

If classical or quaint is your bent, Sonja Zytkow's necklaces and bracelets aren't for you. Why? Because they are literally extra ordinary. She makes them by mixing brass with pearls, glass with semi precious stones, gold with resin and silver with base metals, to name just a few of the products at her fingertips. The result is pieces that seem to leap at you from the wearer's body, demanding you look at them.

They are not for the faint-hearted, yet have been selling faster than Zytkow can make them, both in Paris and in Cajarc, a sexy little cultural tourist destination near Toulouse, France, where Zytkow lived for a few months.
 

Sonja Zytkow - Levitation 1986

Of Polish and Dutch descent, Zytkow was originally a ceramic sculptor who owned a factory in Johannesburg. She was so successful that she had to sell it, for her designing talent turned to administration nightmares. It became a big business "by default", she says, as products leapt off the shelves. Managing was not her desired occupation, so she moved on to promote high-end SA products in Italy and France.

On a trip home, one of her former staffers, Angel Khweswa, asked Zytkow to help her establish the Izimbali Group, a grassroots initiative that makes flowers which can be attached to anything from foot thongs to cell phone pouches - and necklaces. The last got Zytkow's dormant creative juices flowing again, and she began designing necklaces without, as she puts it, "the same constraints that trained jewellery designers might impose on themselves. This allows me an unlimited experimental approach to the design of any piece."

So she mixes silver with acrylic, and gold with wood. She talks about pink and yellow gold and describes her jewellery as three-dimensional pieces of sculpture. "The principles are the same but the mechanics are different." She takes her designs to engineers whose eyes boggle when she asks them to manufacture some of the parts.
 

Sonja Zytkow  1986

Zytkow studied fine arts, film-making and sculpture in the UK before obtaining her master's degree in ceramics at Berkeley in California. Her hands fly through the air as she talks about structures, spaces and pieces. "Look, you can't even see what I've used to separate these beads made by a Zimbabwean woodcarver."

She sources silver in India or Thailand because of its quality, and can mix different kinds of materials to suit your pocket. For that's another of her distinctions. Zytkow will design to your wish. If you get tired of your necklace, you can take it back and she'll take it apart and re design it for you. "Some buy on impulse, regret it and want to change it totally, or perhaps modify it," she says. She can't replace some things, of course; for instance, antique Ghanaian beads or 19th-century Zulu beads.

Today, Zytkow sells in France; at Chemistry in Parktown North, Johannesburg; and from her Houghton studio. She designs specific pieces for Galerie Ezakwantu in Franschhoek. Her favorite clients are Italians who, when they can't decide between three pieces of jewellery, simply buy the lot.

Click the thumbs below to view art works by Sonja Zytkow.

 

Click the thumbnail to view our current stock of Sonja Zytkow's jewelry creations.

 

 

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