Title: “The Blue That Remembers”
I made this pendant slowly, almost unwillingly, as though finishing it would make me lose something unnamed. The Emperor stone, this impossible, fractured blue, holds memory inside it, tangled like veins of copper beneath the skin. When I touch it, I see Makarska again, small Adriatic town where I grew up, where sea burned brighter than sky, where salt lived in my hair and the cicadas screamed louder than my heart.
I was a strange, wild-haired girl back then, honey-colored strands messy and salt-stiff, never fitting anywhere. I do not fit here either. Dickens wrote of Pip in Great Expectations, how he could not return to the lower class after touching another world, yet the upper would never accept him, because his origins whispered too loudly. I live there too; between shores, between selves, belonging nowhere.
Rushdie once wrote of freedom after cutting one’s roots. For me… I cut them, yes, but they are still here — invisible, heavy, pulling me back toward ghosts of people, time, and places that do not exist anymore. My Makarska is gone. The endless singing voices, the relentless Adriatic sun, the fearless plunges from cliffs into bottomless blue; all changed, moved, dissolved into years I cannot reclaim.
I fight for my children now, wanting to give them education I had, yet knowing deep inside they will never have it. They will not leap from jagged rocks into warm, turquoise sea. They will not feel what it is to be weightless under endless sky. And I grieve — because freedom for them is different, smaller somehow, tangled with things I cannot undo.
I wrapped emparor stone in copper because copper remembers. It darkens, softens, carries time quietly. Like me, it holds both the weight of leaving and the impossibility of returning. There is a tiny mistake in wire at back — only I know it, but I leave it, as I leave accent in my speech. Not everything meant to be fixed.
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Title: “The Blue That Remembers”
I made this pendant slowly, almost unwillingly, as though finishing it would make me lose something unnamed. The Emperor stone, this impossible, fractured blue, holds memory inside it, tangled like veins of copper beneath the skin. When I touch it, I see Makarska again, small Adriatic town where I grew up, where sea burned brighter than sky, where salt lived in my hair and the cicadas screamed louder than my heart.
I was a strange, wild-haired girl back then, honey-colored strands messy and salt-stiff, never fitting anywhere. I do not fit here either. Dickens wrote of Pip in Great Expectations, how he could not return to the lower class after touching another world, yet the upper would never accept him, because his origins whispered too loudly. I live there too; between shores, between selves, belonging nowhere.
Rushdie once wrote of freedom after cutting one’s roots. For me… I cut them, yes, but they are still here — invisible, heavy, pulling me back toward ghosts of people, time, and places that do not exist anymore. My Makarska is gone. The endless singing voices, the relentless Adriatic sun, the fearless plunges from cliffs into bottomless blue; all changed, moved, dissolved into years I cannot reclaim.
I fight for my children now, wanting to give them education I had, yet knowing deep inside they will never have it. They will not leap from jagged rocks into warm, turquoise sea. They will not feel what it is to be weightless under endless sky. And I grieve — because freedom for them is different, smaller somehow, tangled with things I cannot undo.
I wrapped emparor stone in copper because copper remembers. It darkens, softens, carries time quietly. Like me, it holds both the weight of leaving and the impossibility of returning. There is a tiny mistake in wire at back — only I know it, but I leave it, as I leave accent in my speech. Not everything meant to be fixed.
#rubiace #ballarat #ballaratartist #artisan #ballaratfarmersmarket #ballaratmade #BallaratMaker #australianmade #australianartist #regionalvictoria #wirewrappedjewelry #handmadewithlove #copperjewelry #slowmade #wearablepoetry #oneofakindjewelry #oceaninspired #makersmovement #artisanmade #heirloomjewelry
