Searching for 55 Years of jewellery designs: Sarah McNeill. POST Time Out, March 23, 2024 page 79.
Preparing for a major retrospective of her work at Art Gallery of WA, Cottesloe jewellery designer Dorothy Erickson said she regretted that some of her finest work remained in art museums and private collections around the world. “I do know of one major piece in Perth, but I have not been able to find the owner,” she said. “I checked death notices. He is still alive, but where?”
The exhibition, initiated by the Design Institute of Australia, is titled Pui di Cinquanta, Italian for “more than 50”. For 55 years, Dorothy has carved out an international career as a jewellery designer, historian, teacher, lecturer, curator and art critic. She has been exhibiting internationally since 1979, with more than 40 solo and 350 group exhibitions in Australia and Europe. “Strangely, it does not design. feel like 55 years,” she admitted. “More like 20.”
Growing up on a farm, with her mother Rica Erickson, a renowned wildflower painter and author, Dorothy went on to study botany as part of a teaching degree at UWA. She had intended originally to study engineering, but the university refused on the grounds that they had no women’s toilet. In the 1960s she enrolled at the Chelsea Institute in London to research Australian plants at Kew Gardens and the Natural History Museum. Much of her jewellery design respects her passion for WAs unique flora, and many of her early pieces were based on her mother’s paintings.
“Being the daughter of Rica always kept my feet firmly on the ground,” she said. Along with her intention to capture the essence of the natural world in her designs, she said geometry – “reducing something to a line, to its essence – often came to the fore. These two contradictory forces take turns in. being the dominant influence.” She said many of her works were kinetic, “moving with the body in a joyous twinkling movement of light and dark”. Though her work had varied considerably over the years, she said it was not so much evolving as “cyclical”.
In 2020, she was inducted into the Design Institute of Australia’s Hall of Fame, joining the likes of wallpaper designer Florence Broadhurst, graphic designer Ken Done, furniture designer Grant Featherstone and fashion designers Collette Dinnigan and Akiro lsogawa.
Dorothy said at the time: “No one in WA takes much notice of crafts, so it was, a great surprise and pleasure to be recognised by the Design Institute.”
This year she was made a Member of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours list for her significant service to jewellery design and to the arts in WA.
■ Dorothy Erickson: Pui di Cinquanta is now on show at Art Gallery of WA until June 30.
Dorothy Erickson Acknowledges Exhibition Assistance from The Government of Western Australia.
