Originally from Ungarie, Sarah James’ passion for designing jewellery has taken her to Wagga, Canberra and now Paris Fashion Week. Photo: Supplied.
When Sarah James fell in love with jewellery making while attending Kildare Catholic College, she never expected to one day have her collection modelled at Paris Fashion Week. Now she hopes to raise awareness about coercive control through her unique jewellery collection.
Originally from Ungarie, a small village in the “middle of nowhere”, the 29-year-old first got into jewellery making through a short course and some electives while attending Kildare Catholic College.
Sarah loved jewellery making so much that her teacher and local jeweller Marris Herr offered to tutor her after those courses ended, and set her on a journey to earn a gold and silversmithing degree from the Australian National University.
Plagued with a lifetime of wanderlust, she always knew she was going to travel overseas – but she never imagined it would be for her jewellery collection. She was still travelling up to three weeks before she was set to go to Paris.
“We were staying with [my partner’s family] at the time, and we had all the jewellery on the table to check,” she said.
“It was just extremely sweet watching them go through each piece, because they’re the least gushy people.”
One of the collections she debuted in Paris was about coercive control, something she hopes to raise awareness about after first becoming aware of it through her work at the Attorney-General’s Department.
“I hadn’t heard of it before that, and it’s a really pervasive underpinning of domestic and family violence,” she said.
It was a weird experience for her, as most of the people she met did not know what it was.
Coercive control happens when someone uses abusive behaviour (often non-physical) with the intention to dominate and control another person, taking away their freedom and independence while instilling a sense of fear to maintain power and control.
Sarah also found it worrisome. She noticed a recurring pattern where she’d talk to someone about coercive control, only for them to come back a couple of weeks later and say: “Can you tell me more about that?”
“Slowly, they start to realise they were in a relationship that had a lot of these sorts of red flags,” she said.
“That’s why I took it to Paris Fashion Week, and why I want to keep talking about it [so] people know that it’s more than just a pit in your stomach. It is a really, really dangerous behaviour.”
Each piece from the collection were intentionally blackened and given black dots using a liquid called liver of sulphur, which gives it a weird texture that looks quite “moonscape, earthy”.
“This really dark piece with all these little dots represent people, like a lot of my friends and family,” she said.
“Before I started working in [coercive control], I didn’t know about this and was in the dark.”
The black dots will start to clear up the more you touch, polish and wear them. Some pieces even return to silver, representing how coercive control comes to light as more people talk about it.
She hopes her jewellery can act as a “low stakes conversation starter”.
“If someone compliments your earrings you can say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s actually from this collection,'” she said.
“It sort of gives that softer starting point to ease into the conversation, because that can be a really hard thing to do sometimes. It’s one of the reasons that we don’t talk about it as much.
“When it comes to raising awareness, that’s sort of step one in this because so many people aren’t familiar with coercive control.”
Sarah James runs Little Moments Jewellery out of her tiny backyard studio in Canberra using predominantly recycled sterling silver. Shop her collection on her website, and follow her journey on Facebook and Instagram.
Anyone impacted by sexual, domestic or family violence can contact 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or Full Stop Australia on 1800 385 578.
