I’d like to begin my talk by showing slides from a solo show in 2002.
It was called Jewellery is Life and the venue was Fabrica in Brighton.

The gallery was once a Victorian church that was taken over as a public art space in 1996

The main interior is left pretty much as they found it; far removed from the white cube environment.

The space is about 190 sq metres - so far the largest that I have exhibited in on my own - up till then I had been used to working within an area of usually 3 sq metres.

One of my first priorities was to design the installation of the work -  one that would encourage visitors to walk around the entire space -  because I didn’t want to isolate the work in a particular area like  the centre of the building or against the walls.

The architecture of the church is very imposing and I felt that if I arranged the plinths in straight lines -  either across the building -  like pews  - or from font to alter -  the symbolism of the church would be too dominant.

So my solution was a circle -  but one that was larger than the floor plan of the building. The plinths would describe part of the circumference of a circle, seemingly to come in from a wall at one end of the church and to pass through a wall at the top end.

The idea for this arrangement simply came about from Jewellery is Life  and  Life is a Circle  -  the curved line helped you to image that the jewellery went beyond the gallery space, as if the work was just passing through.

It also served as a device to choreograph people through the space and  - what was also very important to me- was that each piece  was displayed in its own plinth, so that people would not be distracted by other work  just outside their field of vision.

Another important aspect to the installation was that the top of the plinths needed to be on the same plane therefore the ones that were on the stage needed to be shorter in height.  They were painted to match the colour of some earth that I had collected the previous year in the Goldfields of Western Australia. Other possible colours seemed to take on a religious aspect but the red ochre seemed to literally ground the installation.

In the exhibition catalogue for 30/30 Vision at the Crafts Council, each artist was asked to give two magic moments important to their work

My first was about standing at the edge of the Super Pit, in Kalgoolie. So enormous that it can be seen from outer space, yet the gold that is now mined only exists as atoms.  The second was prospecting in the Goldfields, shifting through the earth to find a gold nugget that lay only inches beneath my feet.

The red ochre connects me to these moments.