A word that keeps coming up when you’re talking to Rosaleen Ryan
is ‘sentimental’. It’s as if she’s trying to single-handedly reclaim the
word from the realm of mawkishness and Hallmark cards, asking
us to reconsider it as it once was: that singular feeling of drifting
away in a cloud of melancholy and nostalgia.
Rosaleen’s jewellery label Mamoru is her handmade shrine to
sentimentality; a collection of resin earrings and necklaces that
literally captures the essence of her own memories and experiences.
“My jewellery usually contains dried flora from my mother’s garden
or my own explorations,” she says, “but also hair or ashes or insects.
Basically anything that could spark a memory in someone – a feeling
of missing something or someone important.”
The Melbourne local describes her jewellery as memento mori – in Latin:
‘remember you must die’ – and her pieces are reminders of things lost,
but still held. “Hair is the only part of our body that lasts forever,” she
explains. “I once found a lock of hair in my grandmother’s things and it
turned out it belonged to a childhood friend of hers. She’d lost contact
with the friend years ago, but she had this lock of hair, which meant so
much to her, of someone she didn’t even know anymore. I wanted to try
and capture that feeling of both permanence and transience.”Every Mamoru piece is different, a consequence of the resin that
Rosaleen uses, as well as the casts she hand-makes. “For each series,
I’ll start with a base shape that I mould from Sculpey or clay,” she
explains. “I then make a silicon mould of that, which I use to pour the
resin in. You can get resins that set in minutes, but I use a slow-set
resin that takes around 72 hours. This gives me time to work with each
set of earrings individually, rearranging the objects I’ve chosen and
popping bubbles. I’ll usually spend at least an hour or two on each
earring just popping bubbles.” She smiles. “It’s super-meditative.”
Once the resin is set, she pulls it out, sands it by hand – “Sanding does
my head in” – buffs it, drills it and glues everything together.
In all, it can take two weeks to complete a single pair of earrings;
having started Mamoru in early 2014, Rosaleen recently completed her
500th pair. “I know if I used a faster resin I could be popping out a bunch>my project
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