Sandra Noble Goss

August Jewellery Feature

August 6, 2005 - August 31, 2005

T H E F O S S I L S I live in an area on the southern shore of Georgian Bay where fossils are abundant. My family has a cottage at Big Bay on Georgian Bay north of Owen Sound. Each time we walk along the rocky beach we return with pockets weighed down with fossil-laden rocks. A boat trip across the channel to White Cloud Island results in more treasures (some too big for the boat come back as photographs). These rocks are strewn around our cottage, inside and out; they roll out from under car seats and find their way into our home in Owen Sound. Memory is selective, collective and rarely complete. Just as the fragments of corals, brachiopods, and cephalopods in the Big Bay rocks give an incomplete picture of their time, human artifacts, structures and art document our lives and times but give only partial glimpses of a life. Like the ancient tropical corals of Big Bay, we too leave behind fragments of our lives for other times to examine and to "remember". We leave our objects and art, our structures and histories; we leave our stories. T H E J E W E L L E R Y I like to think of the fossil images in the jewellery as portraits of the fossils I find on the beach. I draw the images and transfer them onto the metal which is then etched in ferric nitrate. Ferric nitrate is a corrosive salt which is not as difficult or dangerous to use as nitric acid, which is traditionally used to etch sterling silver. It's a technique that dominates my creative life recently. Another favourite technique is Married Metal; different coloured metals are combined to create images that appear as inlay.