The Jeweller - Septimus Rex
Hands of a jeweller
And large panes of glass
Click on the images below to view the larger work.
“You need to meet this girl, she is so cool and she makes jewellery out of old coins. You should do a portrait of her”, my friend Nancy told me while sitting in Surry Hills having a coffee and contemplating buying something from the Op-Shop. She was showing me Elizabeth’s Instagram account while chatting about photo ideas.
An awkward introduction by myself and a bunch of messaging later; we had a concept and and a date booked in.
I wanted the image to show Elizabeth in a classic portrait pose but also strongly hint that she works with jewellery and metal.
The concept I came up with was to have all her tools in the foreground (surrounding her like we were looking through the tool rack and one hand posed casually while dripping in gold metal, as if she had just dipped it into molten gold.
Elizabeth brought a bag full of tools she uses every day and also a selection of skulls, horns and jewellery and adornments. This was brilliant as the bucks horns became a frame around her that connected her to the tools in front. Without that the image would not have come together as well. The human skull was a real one her father, a dentist, just happened to have lying around from his Uni days and the first one I had ever held. It’s beautiful and amazing seeing just how fragile those bones are that contain us and how many pieces make up what I thought was a single bone.
My second concept was to shoot her through a panel of glass. I was going to break a hole about the size of my hand in the middle of it and have her peering through it.
Glass it turns out is bloody heavy and shatters really easily. Go figure.
I borrowed a glass table from my friend Fede and got my partner Ceri to hold it up in front of Elizabeth .
Shooting someone through glass is pretty pointless unless you can see some reflections but I had seen another photographer using vaseline to blur the image.
Out came the petroleum jelly and a good smear of it in the glass made it look like a big old greasy mess.
The magic happened when we took the first photo and the camera focused on the glass and not Elizabeth.
The whole image, especially when zoomed in, takes on a very painterly look. Like broad heavily textured brush strokes on a glass canvas. Whilst editing these I was struggling to decide whether to keep them as a full portrait or zoom in all the way to show off the textures.
Quote from Elizabeth
I have always collected things. Not in an organised way, not even in a fun way, mostly in a really compulsive, erratic, desperate way, an attempt to mark and own as much of the space around me as possible. And I’m not one of those good collectors who keep things in mint condition in hermetically sealed cases or acid free paper. I’m a bad collector with no respect for value or authority. I cut pictures out of old books; I break up beautiful jewellery to salvage stones and precious metals; I paint over valuable stamps and I saw coins apart for their tiny crests and symbols.
I’m also someone who spends most of my time daydreaming. Making and collecting has always been a way to extend my internal landscape into the immediate space around me. The imagination, or mine at least, is a lawless place where anything can be created and destroyed. So I think my obsession with collected and making has been a way for me to feel like I have the same boundless capability to create myself and the space around me in reality as I do in that internal dream space.
I’m also very bad with words. There is so much to communicate but to crush it into language would not be an accurate translation. Instead I use the most expressive things I have, my hands. What I wear and what I surround myself with all have stories and are themselves totems and symbols, a coded correspondence.
Thank you Elizabeth for agreeing to let me take your portrait, you are a beautiful person and I can’t wait to see your exhibition on the 19th of March 2020 (281 Clarence Street Sydney, NSW, Australia) at the Gaffa gallery.
Check out more of her work on Instagram.
Thanks again to Nancy for the into and to Mr Fede for his glass table ;)
