gaia
multimedia jewellery artist based in Melbourne, Australia
Gaia is a jewellery artist working on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country in Melbourne, Australia, creating sculptural adornments that preserve fragments of the natural world through multimedia jewellery processes, with a focus on electroforming. Working with foraged botanicals, insects, bones, fungi, shells and stones, she transforms ephemeral materials into enduring copper relics by entombing them within metal.
Gaia’s creative practice has historically been heavily focused on wearable are, including costume headpieces and masks for performance, inspired by her interest in the relationship between object and body, and adornments as forms of expression.
Her practice is rooted in a deep reverence for landscape, ancestry, and the enduring relationship between people and the natural world. While drawing particular inspiration from the folklore, mythology, and sacred plants of her ancestral homelands in Ireland and Scotland, Gaia's work also explores the universal traditions shared across cultures of carrying keepsakes from the natural world close to the body. Her work celebrates ancient traditions of wearing found objects from the natural world as talismans, heirlooms, and symbols of protection, remembrance, and belonging.
Through electroformed jewellery and sculpture, Gaia honours these enduring relationships by preserving responsibly foraged materials in metal, allowing fragile traces of the wild to become lasting objects of connection. Each piece is created with deep respect for the natural world and its cycles of growth, decay, and renewal. Her practice seeks to reawaken a sense of kinship with the living landscape, inviting reflection on the ancient wisdom held within nature and the stories that objects can carry across generations.
Using foraged treasures from the earth, Gaia works collaboratively with shapes created by nature, allowing natural process to dictate much of the final form, including retaining the textures and imperfections that are found in nature. Once fragile specimens are preserved and frozen in a moment of decay to be repurposed and immortalised.
By combining modern techniques and equipment with ancient stories and symbols, Gaia’s wearable creations invite the wearer to carry frozen fragments of the living earth to connect to place and celebrate the natural world.
exhibitions
Selected exhibition works include Boudica's Prophecy, exhibited as part of the Folktale exhibition at Tanglewood Gallery in January 2026. Read more about Boudica's Prophecy here.
Upcoming exhibitions include Gaia’s first solo exhibition, Undergrowth, which will feature seven sculptural jewellery works combining electroforming and chainmaille. The works incorporate metal plated leaves, thorns and other plant matter foraged in the Irish and Scottish countryside in May 2025. The exhibition honours seven sacred plants: holly, hawthorn, oak, hazel, gorse and fern, exploring ancestral folklore and enduring connection to place.
medium
Gaia works primarily with electroforming, a process of electrolysis that uses a low electrical current to grow layers of copper onto conductive objects. Before entering the plating bath, each organic object is carefully prepared by drying, sealing, and coating it with a conductive paint, allowing the copper to build gradually across its surface over the course of many hours or days. This slow process permanently preserves delicate textures that would otherwise decompose, capturing everything from the fine veins of a leaf to the intricate details of bone.
The natural materials Gaia uses are ethically foraged, including leaves, seed pods, feathers, and animal remains. Animal remains are processed through a controlled natural burial method, allowing decomposition to remove soft tissue while preserving the integrity of the bone. Once retrieved, the bones are meticulously cleaned, prepared by hand, sealed, and electroformed. Many pieces are then finished with nickel plating, patinas and hand polishing, creating subtle variations in colour, depth, and texture.
Alongside electroforming, Gaia incorporates handwoven chainmail and natural gemstones, combining contemporary electrochemical techniques with traditional chainmail weaving to create intricate jewellery and sculptural works.