Who I am - Micartapesta

I am Michela Boschetto, an architect and designer who, partly for the pleasure of making and wearing unusual, personalised jewellery capable of conveying emotion to those using them and partly because forging materials in manual work has always been a passion of mine, has been devoting her energies to making papier-mâché objects and jewellery for four years now.

This was the starting point for an intense desire for research and use of paper in all its multiple expressive possibilities.

I am ultra-rational both privately and professionally.

In my architecture projects it is pure geometry which has always been my primary objective as it is for my papier-mâché creations.

These are not perfect because they are entirely handmade from the making of the paper to the end product and for this reason they are each one-of-a-kind objects, similar in form but diverse in the colour effects obtained by combining papers with different textures and transparencies.

I graduated in 2002 in architecture at Venice’s IUAV but art in general, and architecture and design in particular, have been my primary interests since I was a child.

Always attracted by the Padua goldworking school and the work of its great artists, I’m playing ‘at home’. It is probably for this reason, or because of the creative spirit in me, that I tried my hand at this world trying and retrying to assemble and stick together paper to create objects and jewellery.

Later I attended a course in goldworking and embossing at Istituto Pietro Selvatico in Padua. After this, feeling the need to unite the base material of my creations – papier-mâché – with metal elements, I sought out a more advanced goldworking course to focus on the various aspects of its matter. As luck would have it, I met Lucia Davanzo, a Padua goldworking school artist and pupil of Francesco Pavan, there.

I learned a great deal from her and am still today studying to hone my mastery of goldworking techniques and related design methods.

Combining papier-mâché with metals is, in fact, not a simple matter technically and practically speaking because they are materials whose working methods are very different, one (papier-mâché) using water and glue and other (metals) fire.