Anna Marrone Transforms Phrases Into Objects

Basta. Tutto passa. Malocchio. 

If you grew up in an Italian household you have heard all three, usually at volume, usually from someone who was not asking your opinion. Anna Marrone hand engraves them into gold and silver and sends them out into the world on people's fingers.

Anna Marrone is a jeweller and an illustrator, and neither practice explains itself without the other. Gallery director Melanie Katsalidis spent an afternoon in her Melbourne studio, looking at how hand engraving turns a phrase into an object.
Keen to see more? Watch the video of our visit on Instagram.

At the bench

Her father is offloading everything he owns onto his children at the moment, one ring and chain at a time. “Please give me all your gold,” Marrone says, half joking, and it is as good a description as any of how she thinks about material: nothing is too plain, too broken or too small to be reworked into something with a voice.

The studio is bright, with more natural light - she is told - than most jewellers ever get to work in, and it shows in how she has set it up: an old stool on wheels at the bench, family photographs propped along every ledge and windowsill, sketches and half-finished pieces stacked wherever there is a flat surface. On the day of our visit Anna was between commissions, a run of rings in progress at her elbow, each at a different stage of being drawn, engraved or set.

Anna works in hand engraving, which she has been building into the centre of her jewellery since studying at Metallo Nobile in Florence in 2019. It is an old trade and a narrow one. The tool is a graver, pushed by hand, and the cut is made in a single controlled pass.

She works almost entirely by eye. A checkerboard pattern, one of her recurring motifs, is more often engraved in graduated sizes than in a strict, even grid, not for the look of it but because an even grid means measuring a ring's exact circumference and dividing it into identical segments. “I hate maths,” she says, and graduating the squares by eye lets her avoid the calculator altogether. The one instrument she does rely on is a microscope, though not for the engraving itself: she saves it for setting stones, where the margin for error is smaller.

The words

The titles are the quickest way into the work. Basta. Tutto Passa. Tabacchi. Malocchio. In Vino Veritas. They are the phrases of an Italian household and an Italian street, set in metal with the seriousness usually reserved for a family motto, which is more or less what they are.

“I definitely choose words and phrases that are very on brand for me,” Marrone says. “It might be something that's said in the family or that I've read or seen somewhere and it will just click.” She writes it down in her sketchbook for a future engraving.

She also takes commissions to engrave other people's meaningful words. Recent requests have included basic, disco and lay low, though the family sayings are the ones that keep coming back. On a recent trip to Italy to see relatives, basta (enough) was in constant use. “It's the only thing that will stop them from feeding you,” she says. Tutto passa, everything passes, is the one she thinks lands hardest with other people: a universal truth, and one with a sense of healing built into it.

Typography is the through line. Letterforms are drawn first and then cut, and the sculptural elements are built to sit with them rather than around them.

The other artistic practice

Anna's illustration work is executed in pencil and watercolour, hyperreal, and usually depicts ordinary things. For those who have followed our Gallery for a while, it is already familiar: Anna drew the thirteen gemstone illustrations that accompany Gem School, from the diamond and the Ceylon sapphire through to the parti sapphire, the opal and the gold nugget. They are still available as limited edition prints, from $150.

Seeing the drawings and the rings in the same room makes the connection obvious. Both are about holding a line.

The art of restraint

Marrone deliberately keeps her microscope out of the engraving process, even though it would let her see more. “You can see too much,” she says, “and then you're too critical.” Perfection, in her view, is a trap: “There is no such thing. It's a slippery slope.” It is a discipline she has applied elsewhere too: she used to do a little tattooing, but only for people she already knew well, and eventually stepped back from it altogether. “I just realised that wasn't really what I wanted to be doing,” she says.

At the gallery

A selection of Anna's work is available at Pieces of Eight, 28 Russell Place, Melbourne, open Monday to Saturday, 11am to 5pm. Engraved pieces can also be custom ordered.

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