The Patterns That Shape Us
If you pay attention to the world—truly pay attention—you begin to notice the repeating patterns of creation. There is a quiet architecture that echoes across the cosmos and inside our very bodies. The alveoli of the lungs resemble aerial views of vast forests. Ripples left behind by the motion of water over sand mirror satellite images of large plateaus. Our veins look like the branches of trees in the cold winter months or interlocking waterways that lead to the ocean. Even the molecules pulsing around our bodies in our blood orbit with the same patient rhythm as planets circling a star.
Your veins look like the branches of trees.
Your body is its own landscape.
Natures patterns repeat throughout our reality, Branching, spiralling, rippling—these are remnants of ancient interactions, slowly perfected over billions of years. They show us how things grow, how they move and how they are related. Once you notice them, they begin appearing everywhere, like a quiet reminder of the interconnectedness holding everything in place.
How Nature Led Me to Organic Jewellery Design
When I first began making jewellery, I didn’t yet have this language. I only knew that I was drawn to texture that was raw, irregular and earthy. I wanted my jewellery to feel unearthed rather than manufactured. I imagined the dwarves of Moria mining my jewels fully intact from the mountain itself. A bit like ancient artefacts discovered in the sand which have been shaped by forces older and wilder than human hands.
As I have spent more time with silver and gold, I have realised what I was truly fascinated by...and it was chance. I didn’t want complete control. I wanted the metal to have a voice of its own. I wanted nature at the workbench with me. I wanted to be a conduit rather than the leading force wielding power over her Kingdom.
This story is why I fell in love with water casting & sand casting. And these processes have remained foundational to my practice.
Why Sandcasting Speaks the Language of Nature
Sand cast jewellery holds a kind of beauty you can’t design deliberately. The sand shifts, compresses, softens, and resists you all at the same time. Some areas cast perfectly yet others crumble or warp. But those unexpected moments create the most honest textures—ridges, valleys, organic formations—surfaces that feel more like geology than jewellery.
The metal decides what it wants to become, and I have learned to listen and work alongside it.
Water casting takes that surrender even further. Pouring molten metal into water is pure unpredictability. The metal twists, curls, splits, reforms—never in the same way twice. This is the closest I have come to watching universe create in miniature. Every pour birthing a completely unique form.
No mould. No design. Just metal responding to its environment.
Letting Intuition Lead the Process
Even when I work in wax, I avoid precision in favour of intuition. I often drip the wax with a soldering iron rather than carving it cleanly. The drips fall wherever they choose. I hardly ever sketch jewellery either. The piece always begins with the stone. I gather the stones, sit with the materials, and allow the process to guide the final shape of the ring. It is a feeling as opposed to a mathematical equation.
When I work like this, my brain goes quiet. The thinking dissolves. It feels like creating in a meditative state—half-channelled, half-dreamed.
This is where I have found such refuge in the act of creating. Peace and quite when the mind is troubled.
The Philosophy Behind the Process
The more I invite chance into my practice, the more deeply I understand why I’m drawn to these patterns in the first place. They reflect the way everything interacts—the push and pull between chaos and structure, order and wildness.
I spent many years unsure of what I believed in, unsure of where to place my faith or how to understand the world. But this practice has become a kind of philosophy for me. It reminds me that I am part of the same patterns that I study. I am a small expression of the universe too, temporarily shaped into a person named Annie. One day my jewellery and I will return to a part of the whole again.
There’s comfort in that.
There’s grounding.
There’s a soft quietness that eases my worries.
And perhaps that’s why I create jewellery the way I do: to honour the interconnectedness that has always existed, whether or not we have the words or the understanding for it. Because at the end of the day it is a feeling.
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