Marian Hosking’s recent research has taken her to familiar coastal and inland environments around Victoria and NSW. Areas in the bloom of a La Niña season and areas drying before a long, hot summer: The Grampians, Portsea, Guerilla Bay, Cape Conran, the Pink Lakes, the heathlands of Sydney, the Mallee. Places remembered from childhood holidays that Hosking invites us to see afresh through the small details we’ve forgotten.

Her familiarity with local environments has developed alongside her familiarity with jewellery processes, both honed over forty years of travelling and making. Hosking’s pieces describe fragments of a whole: we can extrapolate whole landscapes from the silvery specifics of her jewellery – they hint at ecosystems we tend to be barely aware of in the day-to-day of city life.

Through her rings, necklaces and brooches, Hosking brings these landscapes to bear on our own bodies. Somehow we are grounded by wearing them, and reminded that we too are irrevocably connected to and dependent on the same complex, fascinating and threatened system. The familiar mustn’t be taken for granted.

Katie Scott
October 2013