Estelle Dévé

French-born, Melbourne-based jeweller Estelle Dévé launched her first collection For J.D., with love and squalor in late 2009.

Her latest collection Lunar Mare is an exploration of cinematic space odysseys, ancient African tribes and Grecian myths.

Estelle is part of this year's Penthouse Mouse, a temporary fashion, art and events space that is part of the 2010 L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival cultural program, and her work is stocked at various international boutiques including Kabiri (London) and Blackmarket (Singapore).

'It's Alive!', 2010 ,pewter casting, metal chain, green fluorite crystals

“Look! It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s alive… It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, IT’S ALIVE!”

Like a jewellery Frankenstein, this item is composed of a plethora of different unused materials: fluorite crystals, metal chains and pewter castings. Oddly reassembled, the different textures combine to form one futuristic pendant on a chain, creating a rough but delicate item as if out of a Mary Shelley novel.

www.estelledevejewellery.com

Leah Jackson

Leah Jackson is a ceramacist. Recent exhibitions in 2009 include Step out of Character Become Yourself, a collaborative work with Rob McHaffie at Darren Knight Gallery, Bottled at PAN Gallery (curated by Kim Brockett & Anita Cummins) and her first solo show Adytum at TCB art inc in Melbourne.

U Do Voodoo, 2010, ceramic, thread

For years I have been giving and receiving small tokens wrapped up with a promise of safety, love and fortune. For my birthday last year my partner gave me a necklace stating its wear would promote me to the status of ‘powerful woman’, but even as a teenager my friends and I would purchase small crystals from the local shop ‘Crystalised’, smoke them with incense, cleanse them with full-moonlight, then give them to the nearest and dearest with similar promises. Despite my common sense lifestyle of today, many of these sacred stones, embedded with a meaning higher than the objects themselves, are still with me.

These ten pieces for Insert Coin Here lay somewhere between ancient ritualistic charms, and a Westfield shopping center – a modern day voodoo to assist in coping with the false promises and the busy metropolitan world around us. Gone are the earthy tones of old magic past, we now require a shallow, saccharine palette to connect with our flat screen CMYK vision. Let these simple physical objects be elevated to a paranormal realm by believing in their ability to quick fix a personal fragility, to fill a void, to improve and enhance oneself.

Michaela Bruton

Michaela Bruton is a recent graduate from RMIT's Gold & Silversmithing course. In 2009 she was the recepient of Craft Victoria's Fresh! 2009 award. Michaela was consistently awarded the RMIT Koodak Award for Best Student in First, Second and Third year (2006-2008) and in her final year in 2009 she received the RMIT Wolf Wennrich Award.

Editions 1-10, 2010, sterling silver, crystal quartz, shark tooth, rock, polymer clay, paper clay, cord.

Editions 1-10 explore the idea that a certain life force indwells within inanimate objects. Repetition is used to create a sense of movement or life within the forms, which are combinations of organic and synthetic media. Ambiguities are created between the real and artificial. Transforming these humble materials into strange imaginings of new alternate worlds and universes that allude to ancient relics, sacred objects and ritualistic practices. They are not objects simply appearing out of context, an object from the past strangely surviving in the present. They are artificial replicas with modern influences, playing on the contrasts between truth and fiction. Forms that link the body to the natural world. Personal objects. ‘Artificial’ artifacts, concerned with utopian possibilities for imaging the future.

Click here to read more about Michaela.