Anja Jagsch: Forager, maker

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.

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,’

Woven reeds, leaves, small branches, pods and flowers are cast into the delicate objects that adorn her jewellery. Some are left in silver and some are gold plated. Each is a one-off piece.

Page left: A botanical ring in sterling silver sits beside Vibernum earrings in blackened silver. Above: A long line necklace with Japanese box bush leaves sits around citrus flower earrings. All in sterling silver.

Anja recalls. Later that year Anja moved to Australia, joining Peter on the tour bus for a time and helping out with their guests. Their shared love of travel and discovery cemented their connection further. ‘It was good but the company did not like that I was taking up a seat,’ she says, so they moved back to Adelaide where Peter resumed his job as an electronics technician.

Anja took things as they came and worked a few different jobs but nothing really stuck. She came across a posting for a program in visual arts and applied design at TAFE. ‘I had started painting at the neighbourhood centre and I really enjoyed it,’ she says. So on a whim she put in her application and was accepted: ‘It was the best thing I’ve ever done. I felt at home and it was nice.’ Anja studied painting and jewellery. ‘Everything about art was new to me, I never thought about art before but I learned about concepts and the social, psychological and philosophical side of things and it really opened up the world to me,’ she says.

In 2009 when she had completed the program, she and Peter packed up, rented out their house and went travelling around Australia taking jobs here and there, fruit picking on the Murray River and working on a Queensland cattle station among others. Jewellery was more portable than painting, and integrating her love of foraging and finding beautiful objects in nature into her work was a natural progression. Anja began to use the ancient technique of lost wax casting, sending her objects to casting companies close to their next destination. She would then have the pieces sent to a designated post office where she would rendezvous with the precious sterling silver castings, >

Above left: Sterling silver rings (left to right) woven reeds ring, acorn ring and 3-in-1 ring. Above right: Gold-plated eremophila leaf earrings. Middle: Gold-plated short line necklace with Geraldton Wax flowers sits around gold-plated Japanese box bush earrings. Bottom left: Geraldton Waxflower earrings in sterling silver. Right: Anja Jagsch in her studio.

before making them into earrings, rings and necklaces. Her jewellery mapped their travels, casting the memories of carefully foraged objects retrieved from their explorations into everlasting pieces. The practical measures that were then borne of necessity became the mode of work she still applies today. and some are gold plated. Each is a one-off piece. Anja sensitively finds the beauty of everything that is alive in plants and captures them in these precious and delicate pieces so that, even transformed into metal, they retain their affinity to nature.

Anja has found community through her work as an artist and currently shows her work at numerous shops and galleries. Locally her work can be found at the Fleurieu Arthouse in McLaren Vale.