Shirley Ewing
What surprised her most recently was a stranger recognising the earrings: her own work, sold months earlier, worn on a beach three hundred kilometres from her bench. Shirley makes jewellery with a jeweller's patience, tiny tools and a loupe at her eye, then spends the rest of the day in salt water or halfway into a costume she has been building since spring. Twenty-nine, tattooed, sunburnt at the shoulders, she treats the line between art and appetite as decorative at best. Nothing about her is complicated; she says what she wants and then waits. Talking to her feels like an afternoon that was supposed to be brief.
