Enamel work on metal is a very exacting art. The traditional skills have to be learnt with patience. There is no room for errors as the medium is unforgiving. Yet the resulting deep jewel-like colours and light reflecting surfaces attest to its continuing fascination for contemporary artists.

Helen Aitken-Kuhnen has worked with enamelling all her professional life in order, she has said, to bring the element of colour into her jewellery. She has achieved international recognition for her technical skills in mastering these age-old techniques. Yet it is her ability to utilise these skills with a thoughtful and deep aesthetic sensibility that has resulted in a contemporary jewellery practice that takes its inspiration from the natural environment.

Mio Kuhnen, Helen’s daughter, has also been learning about the challenging art of enamelling. From her mother as a fellow artist and teacher, she has learnt the techniques of enamelling and together they have taken master classes with Japanese artist Tsuruya Sakurai. However she has chosen her own independent path in making jewellery that is indicative of her own story and experiences.

In her latest works Helen Aitken-Kuhnen’s inspiration has come from the bush and the coastal environment. The Black cockatoo resting series of small brooches are a continuation of an earlier abstract design based on the cockatoo’s easily recognised feathered crest. The brooches are enamelled in a champlevé technique and use bold oranges, yellows and deep velvety black coloured enamels to eloquently conjure up these distinctive birds. A companion series of brooches and pendants, Flight, is seemingly more abstract in composition until you realise that the small streaks of colour represent the flash of parrots in flight as they pass against a pale sky. It's an evocative and poetic series of images of the transitory nature of time.

This thoughtful response to the natural world is continued in the Angry anemone brooches in vivid colours of red and blue. In these works the artist projects onto the anemone she found while diving in the sea an impotent anger against the pollution of the oceans. This series reflects the artist’s recent study of the "moriage" technique of enamelling with Japanese master Tsuruya Sakurai. This is a complicated cloisonné technique where areas of enamel are built up to create a layered surface.

Another series is the Found lines collection of brooches with their beautiful patterns of line and colour. They have been made using a "doro-jippo" opaque enamel technique that gives to their surface a soft warm finish like water washed pebbles.

Mio Kuhnen has been exhibiting a small number of etched silver jewellery pieces for some time. In this exhibition she has been able to demonstrate a wider range of her technical skills in an engaging body of work based on her continuing interest in topography and also in moths.

In her earlier works based on topography her imagery is distilled as it must be when reducing the immensity of landscapes to the intimacy of a small silver disk. More recently it is the Amazon river system and the dynamics of lava flows in Hawai’i that has provided inspiration. Some of these works in this exhibition are accompanied by delicate embossed prints that draw attention to the intricacy of the mapped images that form the structural patterns of the artist’s designs.

Moths are also a new element in the artist’s work. In brooches and pendants the fluttering of an insect’s wings seem to represent the ephemeral nature of life. In one small pendant (moths from the Amazon jungle) Mio Kuhnen has successfully captured in delicate inlaid enamel the sense of movement as if moths are fluttering around a light. In the Amazon- explorer’s wife series imagery is taken from the moth’s wings and is translated into small sculptural metal and enamel pendants and brooches or in the Amazon moth brooches has become the inspiration for colourful inlayed wing-like enamel shapes on round silver brooches.

The small jewel-like objects in the exhibition are the result of the dedication of both artists to learning traditional skills in order to extend their work practices.

However, in addition to being aesthetically appealing in appearance, these beautiful little objects of personal adornment carry the much larger narrative of each artist’s individual response to the natural world. It is a narration that these works carry so poignantly and so movingly. Both Helen Aitken-Kuhnen and Mio Kuhnen are artists who thoughtfully and with sensitivity look up from the work bench at the natural world around them. We would be wise to take note of the story they tell.