Drift Lines
Nellie Peoples
27 July – 24 August 2024
The beach is made of drift lines, all on different time: the seashell rack lines that dance with the waves; the volcanic rock, carved by water, trapping fish and driftwood and oysters; and then there’s my feet, leaving deep pressed footprints that might last until this evening but won’t be here tomorrow.
I cast an eye back and see the moments when something has stopped me in my latest set of tracks –something beautiful enough, different enough, odd enough, strange enough, unique enough, common enough, colourful enough, that I stop. I observe. I feel. I document. If I can I pick it up, and turn it over in my hands, a trace of it always comes with me.
My creations are explorations of these moments of stopping amongst the drift lines.
Drift Lines is a collection of wearable forms akin to three-dimensional drawings-in-wire. They are portraits of shells collected, or simply held, over the past two years. They’re traces of the deliberate and slow daily combing of the beach. Drift Lines evidences my watching and learning of a shifting tidal world.
Between the waves and time, treasures appear.
Drift Lines aims to share the joy of a moment of discovery with you: fragments of shells catching my eye. What is it about it them? Is it their silhouette? Is it the curves they form? Or, the layers of growth that their surface reveals? Is it what they do with the light? I think about their story and the journey it took them to arrive in the moment where our paths cross.
Line is constant throughout my practice. Drawing on my architectural and design background, my first exploration of an idea starts through sketching. I bring these sketches into my studio and aim to simplify the shapes further still. Then I push the technical limits of my construction abilities. I create simplified forms that are complexly made.
In these works, the line can be a layer, a border, a boundary, an edge, or a limit. These lines drift toward the limits of their material, and in their making, there is so often a fine line between chance and disaster.
Great care is taken in the slow making of these shell portraits for you. The shells are studied closely and then built-up layer by layer. Arc by arc. Line by line until the shell portrait appears in all that this silver wire can hold.
The lines on these shells form echoes with those long arching drift lines that stretch back and forth across the shore – back and forth across time. Lines that are in constant movement but are here held still in wire for us to hold the impossible together.
This collection is a narrative of drifting along the beach and through time. The driftlines created as I walk are among the many others that came before me and the many more to come.
Nellie Peoples, 2024
Nellie Peoples
Nellie Peoples is based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She creates jewellery and small objects that tell stories of beloved people, particular places and special moments. She has a Bachelor of Design Arts with First Class Honours from the Australian National University (ANU), School of Art (2013). Nellie has a history in Architecture and Visual Anthropology, which informs her creative practice.
Nellie has exhibited in Australia, New Zealand and further afield. Several stand out achievements includes exhibiting at Talente, Internationalen Handwerkmesse, Germany (2012); exhibited in Profile: Contemporary Jewellery Award, Australia Design Centre, Sydney Australia (2022); currently apart of Handshake Project.