Making Croatia home: Meet talented ceramic artist Alina Gishyan
There has been a steady stream of foreigners who have made Croatia home in recent years. We meet one them who moved from Armenia five years ago.
Like a lot of people, it was love which brought Alina Gishyan to Croatia. Alina has been living for the past five years in between Duga Resa near Karlovac and Rovinj on the Istrian peninsula with her Croatian husband Tomislav.
“I am in love with Croatian nature. I adore all the blue and turquoise colours of the Adriatic sea – the best is in Dalmatia. Those colours you can find in my works,” Alina tells us.
Alina comes from a distinguished family of Armenian ceramic artists. Over the past sixteen years she has built up an enormous amount of experience and developed her own style of unique ceramic functional pottery.
Since her arrival in Croatia, she has intertwined her cultural inspirations with the new experiences she has encountered in Croatia, where she has been focusing on avant-garde and abstract ceramics.
Her artistic mission is to create unique works of art combined with the additional functionality of everyday use, thereby creating all pieces with special food-safe materials.
Currently, Alina is participating in international symposiums and her artwork can be seen in many expositions, galleries, and fairs. She is constantly applying new ideas to her style by experimenting with creating different glazes and artworks.
“This year I had two exhibitions in Zagreb and one art fair in Dubai,” says Alina, who sells her ceramics online and at exhibition.
Alina says she has found a lot of similarities between Croatians and Armenians, and this gave her the feeling of Croatia being like a second home.
The most attractive similarity for her is the old Croatian script, Glagolitic.
“There is a hypothesis that it was created in the Armenian highlands, besides that, some of the letters are almost the same. Unfortunately, unlike Armenian letters, Glagolitic letter has never been depicted with ornaments, and this gave me an the idea ̋to fix that gap ̋ because those wonderful letters deserve more,” she says.
Alina says that it is a pity that Croatia switched to the Latin alphabet, thinking that it is possible they lost a piece of themselves.
