ARTIST FEATURE
Anja Jagsch Forager, maker
Story by Petra de Mooy. Photography by Jason Porter.
I meet jeweller Anja Jagsch at her home studio on a leafy street in Happy Valley, the quiet broken only by the warble of magpies. There’s a casual orderliness to her jeweller’s bench which overlooks the front garden. Things are in their place and small findings and tools of the trade are here and there. Drawers line the walls and macrame pot plants hang in the window. She is softly spoken and friendly. 68
Anja first arrived from Germany to Australia as a tourist in 2001. ‘My parents were visiting friends in Perth over Christmas and I didn’t want to stay home alone,’ she says. She decided to make it an extended three month trip covering New Zealand and a few states around Australia, meeting up with her parents at the beginning and then venturing off on her own. Anja had booked her flights back to Germany from Darwin and planned to make her way from Perth to the Top End by way of a 4000 kilometre tour taking in as much of the country as possible. The tour was memorable not only for the desert terrain, but for the tour guide, Peter. The two fell in love and Anja extended her stay a little but shortly after the tour she went back to her home in Berlin. ‘We were on the phone everyday and in July he came to visit me,’
