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One must look to the entire world to find the influences for jewelry artist Victor Yurivilca. From the small town high in the Andes Mountains of Peru, where he was born, Victor Yurivilca moved first to the big city of Lima, where he was raised and went to school, including three years at a civil engineering college. But that was enough to set him off to seek far broader horizons.
Victor Yurivilca spent the next five years traveling to myriad countries, sampling all manner of cultures and absorbing the essence of the places deep into his soul. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxemburg all knew the budding artist, as did Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Aruba, the Galapagos Islands, Chile and Peru itself, from north to south and east to west.
In the early 1990’s Victor Yurivilca moved to the United States from the increasing turmoil of his Andean hometown. It was here that Yurivilca began to see himself as something beyond the engineer to which his studies may have led him. Always, from a very early age, Victor Yurivilca had success creating things with his hands, from the toys made from recycled wood he crafted as a child to his time in engineering school to the jewelry designs he now began to create.
His natural skills found for him the perfect outlet to combine his own culture with all the cultures to which he’d experienced. Working with various stones and shell from around the world, such as mother of pearl, spiny oyster, crysocolla, sodalite, serpentine and black onyx, combined with sterling silver, Victor Yurivilca now creates remarkable jewelry. Whether it is a pair of earrings, a ring, a pendant or a bracelet, he devotes himself to the challenge of working out each unique design. A small ring can take roughly 12 hours to create while Victor Yurivilca may work up to three weeks on a necklace
For him, working out the design of each piece, knowing precisely when each piece is complete and ready to be let go, is the joy and the challenge of his expression. “It is a good expression of myself,” he explains, “putting together what I think and transmitting those ideas to my hands.” It is a way for Victor Yurivilca to reach deep into his heart and soul to create truly original works that allow him to connect with others. “I wait for the right time to create,” he explains, “the moment when I’m filled with good moods and full of energy. It is with this energy, the reason I feel a connection to every piece. The work truly comes from inside me.”