Peacock brooch

<strong>Influences and ancestors: Pāua dreams</strong>

<em>It’s a slow business to get pāua accepted as craftsmen’s material and not just big business</em>.

Roy Mason, 1981

Pāua (<em>Haliotis iris</em>, or abalone) became a popular material for jewellery in the early 1900s. Manufacturers such as Blenheim-based G D Beatson set the shell in silver to show off its natural iridescence. But by the 1960s, when Ida Hudig was making her subtle modernist designs, pāua was largely seen as a material for the tourist market.

The influential Fingers collective, founded by a group of jewellers including future <em>Bone Stone Shell</em> exhibitors Alan Preston and Roy Mason, would later seek to rescue pāua from its souvenir status. Their 1981 exhibition <em>Paua Dreams</em> was a step towards giving ‘people permission to like [pāua] … even to love it’, as fellow jeweller Warwick Freeman put it.