The Seven Circuits of a Pearl is a journey through the early Australian pearling industry; one of pioneers, explorers, piracy, shipwrecks, cyclones, death, wealth, secrecy and power. The story begins on the faraway coast of Western Australia, where the Indian Ocean meets the Great Sandy Desert, and where peoples for thousands of years have shared a sense of fascination and mystery with pearls and pearl shell as objects of desire and personal adornment, combing the waters of the ocean, risking their lives in search of these precious gems which unlike others are the actual products of living animals; the mollusks.

Like another living vessel of refracted time and memory, the archive of the journeys for pearls sails me back to the journeys of my late father as seen through his own personal archives during his time as a sailor and later on marine engineer in the faraway lands he explored. Driven by curiosity and captivated by the trove of an image of a woman with a pearl necklace found in them, I begin the journey towards the painful discovery of my father’s ex-wife and mother of a half-brother I have never met.

A journey of multiple paths of deception, the topology of the plot borrows from the archetype of the 7-circuit Cretan labyrinth as a pattern of movement though the different narrative paths, twists and crossings, connecting untold stories of personal and collective loss. Maritime disasters, archeological, personal and missing evidence, become the thread between visual and textual material from museum collections, journals, diaries and memoirs researched, and further re-imagined though the mixed-media works produced, aiming at creating an interrelational space amongst the fragments of a larger narrative progressing from an investigative to a more metaphorical and esoteric resolution.