Raw and Refined: Inside Phoebe Porter’s stunning new jewellery exhibition

Posted on 14 October, 2026

What happens when the raw material is allowed to speak for itself? For Canberra-based contemporary jeweller Phoebe Porter, the answer lies in a practice built around contrast: raw and worked, natural and cultural, material and meaning.

For the 2026 Craft + Design Festival, Phoebe presents Raw and Refined in the Canberra Airport Departure Lounge, responding to the festival’s theme of Dissent through both the work itself and the unconventional exhibition setting.

“The whole history of the contemporary jewellery movement is about questioning values and perceived notions of values,” Phoebe says.

Her practice continues that questioning, considering not only the traditional value of gold and gemstones, but also the value of an artist’s ideas, craftsmanship, materials and the stories they carry.

The exhibition brings together native Australian gold, copper, uncut sapphires and diamonds with materials sourced from further afield, including pieces of the Campo del Cielo meteorite from Argentina. Some of the gold has a personal history from Phoebe’s grandfather, a surveyor working in Papua New Guinea.

Other materials have been found through fossicking, gem merchants and the Canberra Lapidary Club’s Rock Swap, where Phoebe sourced Australian copper specimens and met some of the people who had discovered them across the country.

“I see the beauty in raw materials, and appreciate them for their inherent beauty, for the imperfection,” she says.

Phoebe responds to the materials’ existing shapes, colours, textures and weight. A meteorite fragment or piece of copper can become the starting point for a ring, while a deliberately precise stainless-steel hoop or clean circular band provides a geometric counterpoint.

“I’m forced to work in quite a different way because instead of making all the shapes and forms myself, I’m having to respond to what is already there,” she explains. “It’s working with a found object in a way, which I’ve never really done before in my work.”

The resulting pieces bring together meticulous craftsmanship and the whim of natural material. Phoebe is interested in the contrast between the organic and the geometric, the raw specimen and the refined metal, and the natural landscape and the built environment.

This sense of order has a strong connection to Canberra. Phoebe trained in gold and silversmithing at the Canberra School of Art, where European teaching traditions introduced a Bauhaus methodology. The city’s architecture — its planned structure, mid-century buildings and pared-back modernist institutions — continues to inform her approach.

“I like to bring order and clarity to my work,” Phoebe says. “I see it as an antidote to the chaotic nature of contemporary life.”

She now works from the iconic Gorman Arts Centre, a heritage complex around a century old and one of Canberra’s longstanding creative spaces. Its gardens, courtyards and community of artists offer a balance between solitude and exchange.

The airport provides another layer to the work. Encased within the architecture of Guida Moseley Brown Architects, the jewellery will be encountered by travellers rather than a conventional gallery audience. Its intimate scale encourages people to pause and look closely, while the airport itself — a place of movement, departure and arrival — echoes the journeys of the materials within the work.

In Raw and Refined, every specimen carries a history, and every finished piece creates a new relationship between material, form, body and place. The result is jewellery that looks both outward — to landscapes, architecture, and geological time — and inward, to the enduring question of what, and who, determines value.

Photography: Pew Pew Studio.