Rubi Ace Designs

Rubi Ace Designs Rubi is a Ballarat Artist and jewellery maker.
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Sublime ShadowdancerSome days life becomes argument with existence. Cruelty is in discovering that world is not what we ...
02/09/2026

Sublime Shadowdancer

Some days life becomes argument with existence. Cruelty is in discovering that world is not what we were taught to believe it was.
I was weaving earrings when I found myself thinking about Plato’s cave: people watching shadows upon wall, mistaking them for whole of reality. I naïvely believed that education, experience and willingnes to look carefully would eventually lead me into light.
Light is not simple as we imagine; not absence of darkness but it is having ability to see it. I discovered that world is not necessarily brighter but you simply see more of it. Beauty and cruelty ocupy same landscape. We consume in order to live; destroy in order to create; speak of morality while discovering how painfully expensive it is to insist upon it.
Wisdom is not seeing only light but it is learning to look directly at darkness without allowing it to become whole of what you see.
I discovered that kindness can be crushed beneath indiference; institutions can become enormous stone machines which consume letters, evidence, pleas and human suffering without ever learning names of those they grind beneath them.Doing what is morally right does not guarantee that anyone will stand beside you. I have spent unreasonable amount of time charging at institutions like Don Quixote at windmills: writing, questioning, insisting that people should do what is right simply because it is right. Walls do not even acquire ascratch.
Absurdity of being human is knowing windmill is windmill and charging at it anyway.
I cannot become indifferent.
At my bench Crazy Lace Agate stones seemed appropriate with surfaces that are landscapes of contradiction of delicate lines twisting into one another until certainty becomes impossible. No single line explains stone. Beauty exists in tension between them.
I allowed copper wire to follow rather than conquer stone which resulted in deliberately imperfect, elaborate, and wild, something that grew than something that was assembled.
I am still learning: that holding two truths at once does not mean choosing between them.
World is terribly broken but still beautiful
Making something beautiful is my small refusal to let darkness have

Where the Wind Still Knows My NameSome days come to a screeching halt.They begin with tears, with the peculiar exhaustio...
14/08/2026

Where the Wind Still Knows My Name
Some days come to a screeching halt.
They begin with tears, with the peculiar exhaustion of discovering that being human can sometimes be simply too much. Then, unexpectedly, something small lifts you, right sentence, sunlight on floor, laugh, moment in which machinery of day briefly releases its grip. For a little while you remember that life is not entirely made of dificult things.
Inevitably, life comes crashing down again.
For the last few weeks I have been writing in language almost entirely devoid of emotion. I have been drowning in legalese, carefully choosing soft, gentle Anglo-Saxon way of saying things, trying to keep my Slavic side safely contained.
I remembered the child I used to be who jumped from piers into Adriatic without contemplating consequences, who climbed trees simply because they were there, ran until her lungs burned, trying to hug wind and finally came home with salt dried into white crystals on her skin and wild, impossible hair.
There was kind of philosophy in that life.
Hapiness was movement, flutter, flurry, something always happening and when nothing hapened, there was sleep.
Five decades later, my body has misplaced instruction manual.
These earrings are my small reminder against stillness.
Azurite and shattuckite, with their extraordinary blues and earthy brown-green traces, set in copper and shaped entirely by hand. Stones have their own geography: mineral colour spreading through darker matrix like fragments of sky appearing between clouds. I surrounded them with sweeping copper lines, coils and curl, not because everything needs grand meaning, but because beautiful object is enough reason to make one.
We spend too much of adulthood trying to become sensible.
Occasionally we should climb tree.
Jump into the sea.
Fight windmill or two.
And remember that we were once creatures made for movement.

Layers of TruthWe like to imagine that truth arrives whole, complete, polished like finished stone, it rarely does, inst...
06/08/2026

Layers of Truth

We like to imagine that truth arrives whole, complete, polished like finished stone, it rarely does, instead revealing itself in layers, each one demanding that another illusion be stripped away before we are permitted to see what was there all along.

This pendant began as something entirely different. My intention was precise, almost mathematical, inspired by an ancient symbol built on order and symmetry.wire has curious habit of resisting certainty. With every weave, braid, coil and leaf, design quietly abandoned path set for it. Structure softened. Geometry yielded to something organic. What began as an idea became a conversation.

For past few weeks I have been trying to give structure to truths that refuse to sit neatly on a page. Writing statements in language so formal and detached that it often felt foreign to me, searching for clarity where every answer seemed to uncover another question, watching civility peel away until only bare framework remained. There is lonelines in looking directly at things many would rather not see, and even greater one in asking questions that are met with silence.

Silence is not the absence of truth. Sometimes it is simply the space around it.

As I worked, copper stoped resembling symbol I had planned. Instead it grew like vine finding its own course, embracing labradorite rather than imprisoning it. Stone itself shifts with light, revealing flashes of gold and blue that seem to exist only for those willing to change their perspective. It asks nothing mystical of us only that we give it another glance.

That is all truth has ever asked.

Handwoven in copper using multiple gauges of wire, woven leaves, braids, coils and sculptural details, this pendant is less destination than record of its own becoming.

Sometimes the finest part of making is discovering that the work knew where it was going long before the maker did.

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