Tracing Dreams With Holly Ryan

Ryan was born and brought up on the Sunshine Coast: a stretch of surf towns and regional communities nestled along the east of Australia, abundant with oceanic beauty and vast, verdant hinterland—an environment that suffused itself into her being.

For much of her life, her reverence for the natural world has eclipsed everything else. The last holiday she took was to climb to basecamp at Everest. “It was amazing,” she attests, “but you’ve got to be the kind of person who likes that kind of thing. There was no phone reception; I was walking through mountainous terrain, through valleys and forests for almost two weeks straight, eating dumplings and soup in little huts…It’s such a simple life over there. The locals don’t want for much. They don’t need much. Life is a gift. I think that was instilled in me when I was young,” she expands, “don’t take more than you give back.”

It is easy to imagine Ryan pursuing a vocation at the very heart of the natural environment (she nearly studied marine biology), but her character leans toward the unconventional. She decidedly enrolled in a Bachelor of Design (Fashion) at Queensland University of Technology with clear intentions. “I didn’t go to uni to study fashion just to become some big designer, I went to uni to study fashion because I love making clothes with my hands,” she says.
Ryan’s affiliation with the tactile runs deep, and has been ingrained in her for far longer than her design education, tracing back to her childhood. “I’ve always been passionate about handmade. I had a hippie upbringing. I was at the markets with Mum and Dad selling jewellery, wearing hair wraps and candle-making and potato printing on fabrics. And Mum sewed all my clothes. Everything was very DIY,” she recalls.

Ryan’s graduate show, presented just prior to her arrival in Sydney in 2011, received an overwhelming response, but it was the jewellery that accompanied her collection that garnered the attention, rather than her clothes. Despite this early interest Ryan directed little attention to the idea of practising as a jewellery designer. Her parents, both trained silversmiths, were established jewellery makers. “It’s always been said in the family that it runs in my veins,” she laughs. Ryan however, independent by nature, wanted to develop a creative occupation on her own terms. “I was sort of resisting jewellery for a while,” she says.

Determined to forge her own path, she went to work as an assistant for Designer Sara Phillips (whose office was coincidently around the corner from where she would go on to set up her jewellery showroom in Surry Hills years later). Although she resisted it, she never completely brushed aside the early interest in her jewellery, and arranged for her Mum to continue making the pieces for the businesses who were resolved to have her designs in their stores.
“The jewellery business started taking off,” Ryan explains. “I’d thought ‘well I can’t expect mum to do this all on her own, plus I probably need to design something else.’ So I decided to learn how to make jewellery myself.” Ryan was taught to make jewellery from scratch with her Mum as her guide. “She was such a strict teacher,” Ryan reflects. “She wouldn’t let me progress until I had worked enough to learn the next step. I’ve never let go of that. Process is part of how I design now.”

When we meet on a quintessentially sunny day in Noosa, Ryan is wearing a fitted black ensemble: a skin-tight bodysuit and slim dress pants, which she announces is out of character. “Generally I wear a multitude of colours, especially on the Sunshine Coast.” Perhaps the most consistent marker of her style is the gold jewellery that adorns her neck, wrists, fingers, and ears. The designs she wears are from her recent collections, and each piece seems to take its place on the landscape of her skin as an extension of herself. The Transience necklace sits against her collarbone, the licks and curls of its chain each individually soldered by hand. Hanging below it, the Joan pendant (inspired by Joan Didion) is a classic chain suspending a microscale jug sculpture. These forms reflect the creative language that Ryan has developed over her years as a designer.

“The design evolution of the brand has changed with me gaining more skills,” reasons Holly. It is true that her designs have taken on a certain evolutionary maturity. They have also intimated where she has been, who she has been, and what she continues to believe in. “My creativity is a celebration of nature…The acceptance of transience, the acceptance of imperfect beauty. This is something I’ve always put into my designs.”

When she started, Ryan’s commitment to locally hand-making each piece—treading gently—was as staunch as it is now. At the time of the brand’s inception, it was uncommon to find handmade pieces in luxury boutiques and having a handmade jewellery label wasn’t considered conducive to scaling a successful business. “I felt like I was constantly trying to be like, ‘this is cool, look!'” Ryan gesticulates. “I promised myself I’d stick to it, and I did. Eventually people started caring about the environment. There’s so much more in a piece that has been crafted with love than one stamped out in a factory in another country.”

Her pursuit of creating responsibly has been constant. As a trainee jeweller—partly out of necessity and resourcefulness, but mostly from an innate sense of responsibility (one she credits to her parents’ influence)—Ryan would go to secondhand shops foraging for old jewellery to melt down and make anew. “I’ve always seen waste as a design flaw. Even then I was trying to think of ways to be circular,” she says. “It was a practice that Mum and Dad have had instilled in them, so it became very naturally instilled in me too. I couldn’t argue with it.”

To this day, Ryan begins conceptualising a collection not by sketching it out on paper, but by taking her tools, picking up some materials, and just starting. The entry point for this process is thinking about how to save materials. “It might be going to a drawer and looking at discarded old designs to see what we can breathe new life into,” she explains. “Or maybe it’s rediscovering stones that I brought back from a trip to India that haven’t been used yet. It’s about reigniting the spirit of those journeys into something else again. Making something is an ongoing journey and ongoing story,” says Ryan.

Journey’s are just that. Rarely straightforward or smooth going. On hers, Ryan admits that she hasn’t always been true to her intrinsic creative self. “There were times when I’ve been zapped of my energy or creative spirit because I was trying too much to be something that I wasn’t. I think I started designing for what I thought everyone else wanted for a while there.”

Finding her way back has been a literal expedition. “I fell back in love with being on the Sunshine Coast because I felt connected to my own spirit here. But everything that happened, like moving to Sydney, was incredible.”

Ryan recalls the expansive possibilities of her practice that were only attainable away from home, like the evolution of her jewellery design into sculpture. Well established as a jeweller, and searching for a different way to display her jewellery, Ryan began hand-carving recycled hardwoods, bronze and stone, fashioning plinths that soon took on the themes of her broader design language: hand artisanship, notions of female power, and the wabi-sabi philosophy of inherent beauty in imperfection. This work caught the eye of Gallery Director and Art Consultant Jerico Tracy, who encouraged Ryan to continue her sculpture making as a serious artistic practice, leading to formal representation and four exhibitions at Tracy’s Sydney gallery Jerico Contemporary.

Ryan has carried this practice with her, where her sculptural works now fill her shop. The latest iteration of these are lamps, made with friends and collaborators Lana Launay and Sam Creecy. Each is an object in and of itself, with hand-shaped wooden bodies that knead, twist and curve, recalling the trunk of an ancient tree, or perhaps that of its source of origin: the upcycled hardwood they are crafted from.

Larger practical pieces (but no less sculptural) permeate the space too. Unsatisfied by outsourcing and observation, Ryan took it upon herself to learn how to use a circular saw and a belt sander so she could build the wooden feature wall and store shelves herself. “I’ve learnt everything. I threw myself completely into the process. I pushed myself, I tested myself,” she smiles.

Ryan is rediscovering a sense of self and speaks to an unmoored, intuitive creative energy. “I’m excited to make things again,” she says. “I go for a swim each morning and when I get to work I want to pick up the tools and start carving—letting that creative energy flow through.” Spending time each day in nature encourages Ryan’s best work. It allows her a heightened receptivity to the beauty of the world. No more so than where she is now.

As she settles into her next chapter, Ryan isn’t slowing down. She’s just moving to a different rhythm.
As if by way of universal commendation for forging forward, for staying close to her values and for persistently choosing to produce and practice responsibly—never taking more than she gives back—Holly Ryan Jewellery has just been accredited with the Australian fashion Council trademark, formally recognising the brand as Australian handmade. Hers is among the first group of Australian brands certified under the new initiative.

“This is what I’ve always done, but now it’s being recognised,” she says with pride. “I cried happy tears when I got the email. I was jumping up and down…It couldn’t couldn’t mean more to me. It feels like it’s happening at the time when it needs to. It’s another thing that’s serendipitous.

Finally,” she pauses. “I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be, doing what I’m supposed to do.”