‘These floating necklace forms work for me as life preservers, that is, operating perhaps as memory retainers for people on the edge. The wood and the pumice necklaces – Drift and Lifebearer seem very much to be about returning home (to Tasmania) sometime. I feel I can (in my mind’s eye) walk into Townsville beach with these wrapped around me and float into the sea and wash up back in north-east Tasmania. The coal necklace – Seam – is like the weighty lifeblood of ancestry – the coal black materiality of the earth that I haven’t answered or perhaps recognised.’
– Julie Gough, 2005