N°085 Statement Earrings - The Sri Lanka Collection

When Nature Started Painting 120 Million Years Ago

Inside Sri Lanka’s Dambulla Cave Temple, I became completely mesmerised by the surfaces: ancient ceilings and walls covered in repeating forms, circles, flowers and strange organic geometries, painted in ochre, rust, black and earthy cream. Thousands of years of human devotion turned into pattern.

Then I looked at my Western Australian fossilised Peanut Wood and thought: nature got there first.

Around 120 million years ago, timber drifting in an ancient sea was tunnelled by wood-boring marine molluscs. Those tiny burrows later filled with pale marine sediment before silica gradually fossilised the entire structure. When the stone is cut today, those prehistoric tunnels reappear as extraordinary circles, swirls and flower-like markings, as though some slightly deranged Cretaceous artist had been let loose with a paintbrush. (These stones were photographed in full sunlight to reveal their remarkable pattern and colour; indoors, the Peanut Wood appears considerably darker and moodier.)

In these earrings, I tried to bring together two astonishing visual languages: the sacred, hand-painted patterns of Dambulla and patterns written by biology, chemistry and geological time, complemented by red quartz and sweeping silver-plated rings (6.2cm long).

Two completely different artists, separated by more than 100 million years, somehow speaking the same language.