JULIA DEVILLE

This Melbourne based, Kiwi designer creates hauntingly delicate taxidermy jewellery using small animals from mice to birds. Her mission is to express the fleeting nature of life, and to preserve something after it has deceased, in turn letting each animal to live on to create new beauty. It might sound creepy to wear the immortalisation of little kittens and deer's with jewels in their eyes, or mice and birds as broaches, but her pieces are original and beautiful. For the faint hearted the wing broaches are an easy starting point, the vivid colours, and fragility of feathers will make you feel you have a life fluttering at your breast, without the reminder of its origin. In fact, she is an animal rights activist, using only animals which have died of natural causes, and really sees her work as honouring lost life. As a gold and silversmith technician, her work is of fine quality, exhibitions in both London and Paris confirm this. But is her combination of these more traditional elements with materials that were living jet and taxidermy which give her work its special edge. DeVille is fascinated with the Victorian aesthetic to communicate mortality in the Memento Mori period of the fifteenth-eighteenth centuries, their mourning jewellery and methods to sentimentalise death with adornment. She sees her work as a reminder of our own mortality, and as a celebration of even the shortest life.