MARGO CSIPO
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Margo Csipő is an emerging art jeweler, illustrator, and an educator at the Baltimore Jewelry Center and Maryland Institute College of Art. She has a BFA in industrial design from the Massachusetts College of Art and is heavily influenced by time-based art forms like film, animation, graphic novels, and book illustration. Tapping into her lived experience as a queer artist and a child of an immigrant, Csipő creates fabrication-heavy illustrative compositions with mother of pearl scrimshaw. Her work has been shown domestically in the US and internationally, including Schmuck 2024. Csipő was a 2024 finalist for Art Jewelry Forum's Young Artist Award
ARTIST STATEMENT
As an illustrator and jeweler working with sequence, symbols, and metaphors, my muses are enigmatic: a stone wall constructed or demolished, hands cutting string with scissors, dandelions proliferating and dying. Illustrations like these question what is specific and what is universal, what is understood and what is alien. Society often neglects stories for those outside the norm, so I craft narratives that seek answers to questions that the culture I grew up in never asked. This iconography could define my queerness or the experience of being a child of an immigrant. Ambiguity is important, as the wearer may have their own experience to ascribe to these pictures. Images are engraved on mother of pearl or chased in silver and riveted or set on intensely fabricated linkages. Structure, repetition and connectivity build the relationships between illustrations, animating tales of the other and the unknown on the body.
