It is a great pleasure to view this body of work by Julie Blyfield at Bilk Gallery. She is an artist that I have always found interesting even though I had only seen a small number of examples of her jewellery and objects in galleries and group exhibitions. In a way this does her a disservice because each of her works is conceived as part of an organic whole, a body of work with each piece feeding into and inspiring the next in the series.

A 2013 Australia Council Creative Australia grant enabled Blyfield to create the works in the Panorama series, an exhibition designed to travel overseas. There was a preview of the exhibition at JamFactory Adelaide, before it was shown in 2015-2016 at the Ruthin Crafts Centre in Wales and The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. The Creative Australia grant enabled Blyfield to create the Panorama series over 15 months – a time during which she noted she was able to let the work flow – like a long-distant journey. The Bilk Gallery has been fortunate to be able to present a very good representative selection of this work.

Blyfield formerly worked at the Gray Street workshop, a contemporary jewellery collective in Adelaide. She now works from her studio in Adelaide surrounded by a bountiful garden that is a source of inspiration.

The title of this exhibition, Panorama, reflects Blyfield's way of positioning her art practice within the context of the South Australian landscape. By concentrating on the small details and characteristic elements of a particular place, an overview or panorama emerges of a special environment. Panorama aims to give us the artist's vision of her experience translated into small delicate items of jewellery and objects. Blyfield notes that she likes the analogy between the precious quality of our environment and the precious metals that she works in.

Blyfield's mode of working involves travelling to areas such as Yunta Springs in the far eastern area of South Australia. She draws and photographs elements that have captured her artist's eye. Small items such as seed pods from the spinifex, eucalyptus leaves, the rough dry bottom of ponds and strange rock formations are all the material that she uses as inspiration. Back in the studio, these drawings and photographs are developed and refined. Then the artist makes three dimensional paper mock-ups of how she thinks they will translate into metal – her favoured medium.

In the Lifeline necklace, small pod-like forms made in silver are strung together as beads perhaps to reference the source of new life carried by seeds. Other seeds from the silky oak found on Blyfield's street are the inspiration for other beads strung together as neckpieces in oxidised black or white silver. Blyfield likes the rattling sound these pieces make that echo the sound of the actual seeds. The silky oak seeds are also formed as clusters in brooches carefully held together by tiny wire threads. Eucalypt leaves become another inspiration for brooches and pendants. Colour is introduced by way of enamel paint in another series of brooches of tiny clusters of caper and lemon flowers. The colour emphasises the tiny forms of these flowers and changes the appearance of the silver so that it looks soft and textual. This interest in the textual quality of the appearance of the surfaces may relate to an earlier series by Blyfield called Traces, 2002, based on her grandmother's embroidery of flowers on domestic linen. The oval brooches in the Lens View series have an Asian sensibility in their fine linear designs heightened by the use of jo-jil or jogeum engraving techniques the artist learnt from Korean master Sung Joon Cho.

In two of the lidded containers – Leaf Stack and Golden Heart Stack – delicate leaves in silver and bi-metal (22 carat gold fused to a silver sheet) are generously massed together. Resembling swept up piles of fallen leaves, they also remind me of the delicate gold wreaths of leaves found in ancient Mycenae and Greek tombs – a memento mori of the ephemeral cycle of both nature and human life.

The little silver Quench Cups are particularly delicate and finely made. Their surfaces are hammered and embossed with tiny patterns with each delicate individual mark almost invisible to the eye. However, I find it hard not to keep returning to the Rockface series of brooches in white silver. These unusual works are based on a series of curious holes in the rocks at d'Estrees Bay, Kangaroo Island. Blyfield has reinterpreted the shapes of these rock holes in five small silver brooches. Their swirling ribbed edges have a tactile quality that invites touch and an irresistible urge to twirl one's finger in their centres.

This is a truly beautiful and impressive exhibition. The objects may be small but Blyfield's creative skill is able to convince us of their capacity to be part of a far wider narrative. To appropriate the words of William Blake, the majesty and mystery of the world is not only seen in a grain of sand but can also be embodied in an object as small as a silver leaf.