Residencies in Croatia

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1. Good Day

   My name is LUNGELO RODNEY MYEZA.

   I am a South African contemporary artist, jewellery designer, performer, costume designer, educator, and researcher whose practice investigates identity through the body. Working across contemporary jewellery, performance, costume, publishing, and installation, I create wearable interventions that challenge conventional ideas of adornment, masculinity, visibility, and human perception.

   Rather than treating jewellery as decorative objects, I approach adornment as an embodied experience capable of transforming the relationship between the wearer, the viewer, and the body itself. My work often occupies unconventional areas of the face and body, inviting curiosity, dialogue, and reflection while questioning inherited assumptions about beauty, wearability, and identity.

   My creative process begins with observation. I develop ideas through making, wearing, and publicly testing my work before reflecting on how people respond to it. This iterative process allows each project to become both an artwork and a form of artistic research.

   My practice is deeply informed by my South African upbringing, my training as a goldsmith and jewellery designer, and my studies in Italy, where I expanded my understanding of craftsmanship, material culture, and experimental body adornment. These experiences continue to shape a multidisciplinary practice that moves fluidly between jewellery, performance, costume, publishing, and education.

   Alongside my studio practice, I lecture and mentor emerging creatives while pursuing research into contemporary jewellery as an expanded artistic field. My current projects explore performative identity, embodied authorship, grotesque aesthetics, carnival traditions, and the capacity of artistic interventions to expand how people perceive themselves and the possibilities available to them.

   My areas of practice are as follows:

   * Contemporary Jewellery
   * Performance and Body Adornment
   * Costume Design
   * Artistic Research
   * Artist Books and Independent Publishing
   * Installation and Public Interaction
   * Creative Education and Mentorship

   Current Research Interests

   * Embodied identity
   * Performative adornment
   * Contemporary jewellery as artistic research
   * African material culture
   * Masculinity and self-authorship
   * Carnival, ritual, and transformation
   * Wearability beyond ornament

   I am interested in applying for the residency, but I am not sure if I qualify because of the country that I come from. I didn’t see it on the list of counties that qualify.

   Best Regards
   Lungelo Rodney Myeza

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