.

I like to think about what it means for me to make necklaces that are bigger-than-me- that are not necessarily beautiful and not clearly necklaces either ...
I ask is the traditional shell necklace today a carefully maintained sign of cultural continuity, connectivity, authenticity and authority and so very different to
what it   was 200 years + ago  ?  (I don't know what it once was). The use of macro [and maybe future micro scale works] are about that navigation of
myself in my work = physically challenging myself, my arms, my lifting, my body- around traditional practice, place, materiality and cultural expectation
of what something is used for/is supposed to "DO".

These floating medium necklace forms work for me as life Preservers ie: operating perhaps as memory retainers  for people on the edge
(the peripheral me - the whole interstitial 'bit') . The wood and the pumice necklaces - "drift" and "lifebearer" seem very much to me about returning
home (to Tasmania) sometime. They are my evidence to me that I have an emergency means - a facility - to make a craft to bring me home in the
form of a necklace - a magical necklace.

I feel I can (in my mind's eye)  walk into Townsville beach with these wrapped around me and float into the sea and wash up back in North East Tasmania.
I feel that when I am collecting these materials - that if I lose almost everything of myself - even the possibility of asking for help to return,
If I cannot articulate my need in cogent language to explain my need to return- that I could still, if I can stay near a beach- make the means of my return
 - these necklaces or a raft... I feel that If I drowned with these around me it would be in the arms of the sea and the maker of all necklaces and would
be peaceful. I was rescued off a rock I was stranded on off Rodrigues Island in 2002 - after near drowning - I so nearly drowned - was embraced by
the dark, warm drift downwards- that I don't fear or question the sea's ability to decide when to take someone.

The pumice necklace has come out of land into fire (volcano) and into water [sea] to float back to land and be built into a floating land - a kind of island-
that could take me away. The coal necklace (SEAM) is also a bit elemental in material- there is a lot of coal mined up in QLD - but I am unsure where
this coal [ covered with barnacles and other sea life ] has come from. I found it up here north of Townsville at lowest tide like black spots that seem/seam
at first to be a mirage of poor vision (black spot) yet announce a possibility of home and hearth to me- they are a source of warmth from fire and in the
water they are the firestick doused and "OUT" - I collect them and think about how my ancestor's firesticks have not yet been entirely relit by us their
descendants.

I feel afraid to light my coal necklace at this point in my life, I am unsure of the spirits of the dark and night that I would have to encounter to be able to
walk properly and cross into the two worlds that I have trained myself to tightrope 'between'. The coal necklace - the seam - is like the weighty lifeblood
of ancestry - the coal black materiality of the earth that I haven't answered  nor perhaps recognised the call of. The coal coming to me from the sea is a
bit like a reminder to face the land and remember  responsibility to all sides of self- land and waters.

The necklace-like works operate as my imaginings of how to merge and move myself around (kind of like with time and tide) back to from where I come. 
The necklaces are  elemental ways of re-joining myself back to traditions that seem lost in their recognisable popularised makings in my immediate family. 
I think the necklace and multiple object in my art forms (over a decade) articulate my connection to a culture that did collect (and still does collect to survive ).
Through repetition in my work a language of  understanding place and being-ness is articulated and presented to outsiders to hopefully enable viewings
of the ways that forms such as necklaces and materials provided by nature impact on me, seem to urge me to spell out myself through them.