In 2024 and 2025, I made a jewellery collection of work that was built from places that I’d travelled to, remembered and felt in my body from a life so far. After years of working on different pieces, this collection arrived almost fully formed in my mind. It was cohesive and asking for a solo show.

I called the collection I Was Just Here, and I approached Monstsalvat as the home for it, which felt right. A show about Genius Loci, the intangible spirit of a place, needed a setting saturated with exactly that. It also didn’t hurt that I had decades of memories there. The exhibition catalogue is here.

Most of the pieces in the collection were made in honour of a physical experience of place, with clear memories and photographic references. The anomaly – Ghost Geography – arrived unbidden and fully formed while sitting at my workbench. It was received rather than remembered. It paradoxically felt at home in a collection of places I’d been, despite being one I hadn’t. The received image was one of a woman in period clothing, standing at a sheer cliff, facing west over the ocean. My experience of her was atmospherically complete with light, sensation and sound. I felt as though I was witnessing her, my present-self observing from behind. Even her emotions were accessible to me – she was strong, resolute and determined, scanning the coastline.

There is no photographic reference for this work. I felt I could faithfully record the location via my hands so I began to carve a representation of the images in to wax so that I might see if it would make interesting and beautiful rings. I cut, carved and filed the coastline, the headlands and inlets and the geology of time in to wax until it felt true to the place she stood. And it worked, complete with sapphires and diamonds, and one without, they became glittering odes to her and this place.

The life of these rings after the initial making is interesting to me. They arrived without being summoned, they were made without force, they found their people without external direction – the women who have chosen iterations of these rings were drawn to them without being steered. That something I received so privately could resonate so intimately and broadly, and be recognised without knowing the backstory, really inspires my curiosity.

This experience is far from unique to me. Receiving ideas rather than consciously creating them is common among artists, writers, composers, scientists and, I’d add gardeners to the list. Some interpret it spiritually – a muse, divine inspiration, the unconscious speaking, others interpret it psychologically, and then there are Jung’s archetypes, the collective unconscious, and concepts such as inherited memory. It is a subject where art, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology and spirituality all overlap – across cultures and centuries.

So, whether my woman is an archetype, a past self, an inherited image or something else entirely, these rings exist, they continue to evolve and in a collection that is otherwise about physical locations I’ve visited, they are without doubt my favourite pieces.