The tiny room at the rear of silversmith Rachel Grose’s home was, she says, originally a bedroom. A terribly small one.
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It now contains all the tools of her trade, neatly organised for the processes involved in making jewellery: hammering, heating, burnishing, flattening, rolling, polishing. There’s a small anvil, an electric polisher and drill press, vices and hammers and things with odd names.
Grose says she comes from a family of tinkerers, which gave her the ability to pick up manual skills easily. A picture of her grandfather on the wall reminds her of his inventive mind.
“He worked at the brewery and did a lot of lathe work,” she says.
“All that side of the family tinkered in sheds, and I always hung around. My father had two daughters, and we fixed up old cars and mechanical things. I’ve always loved tinkering and making little things.”
That love led Grose to accompanying her mother to a night course in jewellery making, with which she readily admits she found more exciting than her mother.
“My mum sort of went ‘meh’, but I was obsessed with it,” Grose says.
She did a three-year course in jewellery making at Monash University, and is now an established jeweller and silversmith.
Her designs are based on her love of organic shapes; Grose is a member of the Ballarat Bonsai Society and images and filigrees of tiny trees are an integral design element in her creations.
Grose is also a member of the Ballarat Lapidary Club. She pulls out a container of shaped stone: opals and turquoises abound.
I buy different stages of silver. I make the ring from the beginning to the end. The processes are really wonderful. They're very time-consuming, so you pick what you want to do on a day. I have a lot of scrap metal and you can melt it and pour it into an ingot and then put it through the rollers and turn it into sheet metal. I do a lot of stuff out of sheet metal. But now I buy all my bezels - the pieces you wrap around the stones and it's a really thin fine silver - it's just easier to go to these two really amazing shops down in Melbourne. It's kind of like going into Harry Potter, up these little alleyways. And you can also buy sheets of ready-made. I also buy through a place that recycles silver. There's so many processes to get it where you want it. You hammer it down - pure silver is really very soft so you actually add a little bit of copper and stuff which makes it sterling silver: that's 92.5 percent pure silver and a little bit of other metals and the alloys mean that it's easier to work with, it's not so soft and it is much more durable. I have some things that you actually add in. You're actually adding a little bit of fine silver and a few other different elements, and some flux and borax and different things to when you melt it down so it's pretty much exactly the ring that you've got - but then you can turn it into anything you like, really.
- Making a ring from scratch - Rachel Grose.
“I'm really quite obsessed with turquoise at the moment. And opals and all sorts of these really unusual Australian stones. I’m putting stones into my work now for a little bit of colour; and then there's always sort of a bit of a hidden element or design on the back which is usually nature-themed.”
Having studied art history, Grose draws her inspiration from a wide span of influences, from the opulence of Faberge to the cool restrained lines of the Danish designer Georg Jensen.
“Faberge had the best enamellers and the best stone workers – just the best people working for them. Georg Jensen’s work is very beautiful Art Deco, very simple, which can be hard to get. We over-complicate, and jewellery is about refining your work, clawing it back. He was a master of that.”
Grose turns over a silver pendant in her hands. An elegant, simple silhouette of a bamboo stem gleams in the afternoon sun.
This article is part of a Courier series on Women in Design, focussing on women making creative paths for themselves in Ballarat. More, including multimedia, at thecourier.com.au
