伦敦托马斯·戴恩画廊(Thomas Dane Gallery)

利兹·斯威格(Liz swigo)在伦敦托马斯·戴恩画廊(Thomas Dane Gallery)观看了美国艺术家凯瑟琳·奥佩(Catherine Opie)的照片，她的最新项目迎来了灵光一现的时刻。我早就知道凯西的作品具有大师的气质，痛饮说。《;但我清楚地记得站在她面前的椭圆形照片,思考如何cameo-like .’痛饮,2014年创立Lizworks作为创新平台与当代艺术家合作,走近Opie问她是否有兴趣一起工作在另一种形式重新定义她的肖像。swigo 2016年的项目enchanted (W*215)给Opie留下了深刻的印象，这是一个包含了7位主要女性艺术家作品的魅力手镯，Opie立即同意了。“迷住”是一件令人难以置信的漂亮作品，在与利兹初次交谈后，我确信她会考虑我的想法，Opie说。我一直在做这些肖像，我总觉得这是一场与浮雕人物的对话，尤其是当我开始用黑色背景制作椭圆形的时候。我真的想在客串中加入一些当代元素，把客串元素带回来。斯威格一直喜欢把传统的当代元素制作出来。这是“魔法”的指导原则，在新项目名为“客串”(Cameo)的项目中，她重新诠释了一种最古老的肖像画形式，这种肖像画可以追溯到古代迈锡尼文明，当时奥林匹斯诸神的侧面像是用玛瑙雕刻的。我开始询问人们在哪里可以找到能够实现这个项目的雕刻师，痛饮说。我访问了那不勒斯的Torre del Greco，那里制作贝壳浮雕已有几个世纪的历史，但要找到一个能做出原创设计的人并不容易。最后，我找到了吉诺·迪·卢卡(Gino Di Luca)，他是第三代客串制片人，来自最古老的家族企业之一。

The light-bulb moment for Liz Swig’s latest project came as she viewed the photographs of American artist Catherine Opie at Thomas Dane Gallery in London at the end of 2017. ‘I had always known Cathy’s work to have an old-master quality,’ says Swig. ‘But I distinctly remember standing in front of her oversized oval photographs, thinking how cameo-like they were.’Swig, who founded Lizworks in 2014 as a platform for creative collaboration with contemporary artists, approached Opie to ask whether she would be interested in working together to reimagine her portraits in another form. Opie was impressed by Swig’s 2016 project Charmed (W*215), a charm bracelet encompassing works by seven leading female artists, and agreed immediately. ‘Charmed was an incredibly beautiful piece and after an initial conversation with Liz, I was sure she would take care of my ideas,’ says Opie. ‘I had been making these portraits that I always felt were a conversation with cameos anyway, especially when I started making the ovals with the black background. I really wanted to make something contemporary in relationship to the cameo, to bring the cameo back.’Swig has always loved the idea of making the traditional contemporary. It was the guiding principle of Charmed, and with Cameo, as the new project is called, she reinterprets one of the oldest forms of portraiture, dating back to the ancient Mycenaean civilisation, when the profiles of the Gods of Olympus were carved in agate. ‘I set about asking people where to find a carver who could realise the project,’ Swig says. ‘I visited Torre del Greco in Naples, where shell cameos have been produced for centuries, but it wasn’t easy to find someone to produce original designs. In the end I discovered Gino Di Luca, a third-generation cameo maker from one of the oldest family firms.’