Between the covers of Sapphire
I’m delighted, and a little humbled, to share that my family and I appear in Sapphire: A Celebration of Colour, the new book by gemmologist and jewellery specialist Joanna Hardy.
Sapphire is the third volume in Thames & Hudson’s series on the great coloured gemstones, following Emerald and Ruby. It runs from antiquity to today, through royal collections, the great jewellery houses, and the designers working now. To find our story in a book like that, among jewels that have been worn by queens, still takes my breath away.
Where it began: Rubyvale
It’s a story that began a long way from any royal collection. My family left the UK for Australia when I was two. My father worked in an oil refinery during the week and spent his weekends in the bush, fossicking for opals and garnets. That search eventually led us to Rubyvale, in the Central Queensland Gemfields. I grew up there in a tin shack with no running water, picking sapphire crystals out of the dirt and keeping them in a matchbox like treasure.
Back to the wheel
I never imagined that matchbox would lead anywhere. I apprenticed as a lapidary at fifteen and studied goldsmithing in Sydney. After moving to London, I spent twenty-eight years away from the cutting wheel. In 2017, after my father passed away, my mother gave me a cutting machine in his memory, and I began cutting again. So this book belongs to them as much as to me. My father started it all by going out looking at weekends, and my mother has kept it going in her own way ever since.
With thanks to Joanna
Joanna has championed my work for years, and she was one of the first to write about the way I cut sapphires to show their natural colour, untreated and as the ground gave them up. To be included in her book, alongside my family, is an honour I’m still taking in. My thanks to her, and to everyone at Violette Editions and Thames & Hudson who made the book what it is.
Where to find the book
Sapphire: A Celebration of Colour is published by Thames & Hudson (ISBN 9780500024775), a 328-page hardback with over 450 illustrations.
If you’d like to see the stones and the story behind my work, visit my about and gem cutting pages, or get in touch about a bespoke commission.
“Every stone I cut still begins in that same ground. It’s good to see it in print.”
- mark nuellI’m Mark Nuell, a goldsmith and lapidary artist working in London and Devon. I grew up fossicking for sapphires in the Queensland Gemfields, and today I cut every stone by hand and set it in gold traceable to a single Australian mine. Most of my work is bespoke, designed around the individual character of the stone it’s made for.
