For Boiling Matters, Zorraquin investigates jewellery’s potential as a social tool: an agent for generosity, care and exchange. The work comprises five hand-thrown ceramic teacups connected by a handmade brass chain. Zorraquin will invite participants to activate the work through the ritual of sharing in facilitated weekly tea drinking sessions. The choreography of sipping tea while linked together introduces humour and intimacy, prompting reflection on interdependence and the small negotiations that shape human connection. Through this work, the artist explores how shared rituals can transform everyday gestures into moments of empathy and awareness.
Please join us to celebrate the opening of this exhibition at First Site Gallery, 5– 7pm, Wednesday 20 May.
Elisa Zorraquin is a jewellery artist and PhD candidate at RMIT University. She explores contemporary jewellery through the lens of community engagement and sustainable practice. Her research, ‘Crafting Connections: How Emergent Material Practices in Jewellery Build Community’, investigates how jewellery can foster dialogue and connection through playful, interactive designs created for multiple wearers. With a background in industrial design, Zorraquin blends functionality with artistic expression, transforming everyday materials and gestures into poetic acts of exchange.
Her work emphasises the value of noticing and celebrating beauty in daily life while exploring how objects can invite care, generosity and participation. Zorraquin’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in Munich, Germany; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and New York, USA, as well as locally during Melbourne Design Week. She has also participated in the Radiant Pavilion Contemporary Jewellery Biennial in 2019, 2021 and 2024.
Thumbnail and banner image: Elisa Zorraquin, Untitled (detail), milk and vinegar bottle modules, glass beads and thread, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
11am - 5pm Tuesday to Friday
Closed on public holidays
'Portable Stillness' (2025), is an ongoing spatial installation that explores how the making of miniature objects and floating altar-like displays can express memory, collection, and the domestic in transition. Motivated by the instability of diasporic living and continual relocation, Ko Jou Chen constructs handmade structures that carry memory and presence across her shifting environments.
'Slip' is a practice-led research project that explores the poetic qualities of the bluestones that have been discarded in recent construction works around RMIT University. Through the process of moulding and casting these stones into beeswax, Noah Bridger hopes to reimagine Melbourne’s urban landscape.
Chloe Rose Thomas’ exhibition, 'Can I Hold You?' centres on queer community and embodied practices of care, exploring what it means to take traditional photographic portraits of non-normative bodies and the histories they represent.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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