I have been thinking about how women wear things that come out of the ground, gold, stones and minerals, and how they are almost magically transformed by artisans into objects of beauty.
Of course jewellery is not only for women. I make cufflinks for men too. But it is the transformation that fascinates me.
Gold, lapis lazuli, silver, copper and gemstones all begin as geological material. They are mined, separated, refined, cut, polished, cast, plated and set. Eventually something that once belonged to the earth is worn against the body.
Perhaps that is why making jewellery has brought back memories I had not thought about for years.
Recently I was talking to a woman about gold jewellery. She told me about pieces she had inherited, from her mother, from Ghana. She believed they were solid gold and more than 24 carat.
That stopped me.
Twenty-four carat is already the definition of pure gold. Pure gold is extremely soft and malleable, which is why most jewellery is alloyed with other metals, or plated over something stronger.
Some of the findings I use are described as 24K gold, but what that actually means is 24K gold-plated 316 stainless steel. The stainless steel provides the strength. The gold is the surface.
That small conversation suddenly took me back more than forty years.
I began working during the school holidays for my father’s mining company, Magnet Metals, when I was about fourteen.
One of my earliest jobs was colouring Geological Survey maps by hand. Colour printing was not readily available in the office then, so I sat with coloured pencils filling in the geological areas for the geologists.
By the time I was eighteen, I was working as a mineral observer.
We examined mineral concentrates under microscopes, looking for diamond indicator minerals. It was painstaking work. You learned to notice tiny differences in colour, crystal form, shape and surface.
After that I became involved in putting together mining and oil lease applications, including around twenty-one oil and gas leases for Magnet Mining.
Exploration was part of the atmosphere I grew up in. My father had seventy-two oil and gas strikes in his lifetime. He was always thinking about what lay beneath the surface, what a landscape might be telling you, and what materials might become important in the future.
At around eighteen, I also went prospecting near Kalgoorlie for him.
The place had been suggested by old prospectors in Kalgoorlie. There was an oral history about a particular patch of ground. They told us where to go, and I remember that it was close to the highway.
Most of all, I remembered the ground itself.
Three different soil types and colours came together in one place. When we arrived, it was obvious. They seemed to meet almost like slices of a pie.
We took Dolly samples there.
The samples themselves were not black, but I remember black mineral material appearing after they had been processed.
That visual memory stayed with me.
My father always said that you should never travel without a magnet.
His first mining company was called Magnet Metals, and I suspect the name was very deliberate. A magnet is one of the simplest tools in mineral exploration. It immediately begins to tell you something about what is in a sample.
All these years later, while thinking about gold again because of the jewellery I am making, I went back to Google Maps and began searching the country around Kalgoorlie.
I knew roughly what I was looking for.
I remembered the highway. I remembered the old prospectors telling us where to go. And I remembered those three colours meeting.
Eventually I found a place that looks remarkably like the one in my memory.
There is an old drainage line. There are clear changes in the colour and texture of the ground. The surrounding country shows signs of decades of later exploration and mining activity.
I cannot prove with certainty that it is the exact place where I took those Dolly samples, but I was surprised by how much of the landscape I could still recognise.
It made me realise that my relationship with materials began much earlier than I usually think.
Before bronze, plaster, oil paint, resin, lapis lazuli and jewellery, there were Geological Survey maps, coloured pencils, microscopes, mineral concentrates, black grains, goldfields and a magnet.
Today I am working with some of those materials at the other end of their journey.
I have been making new earrings using resin, gold-plated 316 stainless steel and mineral pigments. I also have some very old gold leaf that I inherited. Its worn boxes and delicate sheets seem to carry time with them.
That is what interests me now.
Not simply gold as something precious, but the journey of a material.
From the ground, to the hand, to the body.
Perhaps materials are never only materials.
They carry memory.