Among Rebecca’s earliest memories are those of coming to St Leonards to visit her grandmother, during school holidays. It’s a place where her family stories and connections are strong, and a place she would eventually return to live with her own children.
She remembers each time, the excitement of that moment when, they would arrive at the top of the Murradoc Road hill, after the long drive from home in Ballarat, to get a first glimpse of beach. It is a view that still inspires a sense of awe. They would then drive down into St Leonards through the Avenue of Honour Cyprus trees before turning left into grandma’s street. ‘A lot of time was spent at the beach and in the sun’.
Rebecca’s uncle started Neville Richards Real Estate in St Leonards and her grandfather and uncle had a boat moored at the St Leonards Pier for many years. Rebecca said they were very keen amateur fisherman, usually chasing whiting. Though not keen on fishing herself, Rebecca often went on family outings in the boat across to Portsea for a picnic and swim off the boat or at the pier.
After completing secondary school in Ballarat, Rebecca went to university in Melbourne, and then travelled overseas before returning to live in Sydney where she ‘saw the sun and stayed for the next 25 years – living in a number of places, all near the beach’. During this time there was more travel and a realisation of her creative interests and talents. Though studies in chemistry would later come in handy, it lost out as a career path.
Looking into the window of a shoe shop in London, Rebecca was inspired to start shoe making on her return to Sydney. She took a course and set up her own studio in Paddington with the help of a Turkish fashion shoe maker who introduced her around the western suburbs to meet other shoe makers from all over the world, and to gather together the equipment and machinery she needed. Rebecca sold her shoes at markets and took orders for custom made shoes, including a pair of size three wedding shoes, shoes for drag queens and an order of twenty four pairs of high heeled sandals for Fashion Week. ‘I also made myself a pair of beautiful boots’.
After a few years Rebecca got the urge to travel again; this time with the intention of going to Spain and working with a shoe designer. ‘But I got distracted and went to visit family who were living in Hong Kong at the time. Soon after arriving in Hong Kong I got a job as a movie extra, then stand-in for Milla Jovovich in the sci-fi movie Ultraviolet. It involved a lot of yoga poses with fake laser guns.’ Working as an extra opened other doors and Rebecca stayed on in Hong Kong for a year, teaching English to children from all different backgrounds. Rebecca ‘really enjoyed teaching, the kids loved her’. Her approach was ‘very informal and involved travelling to the end of every train line and talking about anything and everything around them’. This was a skill that would come in very handy later on when home schooling her own children during Covid restrictions, where the beach was often the classroom.
Rebecca returned to Sydney after a year in Hong Kong and restarted her shoe making business; gaining an Advanced Diploma in productive design and innovation in the process. Back in Sydney she met her partner; they had two boys and started a business together distributing organic health products across Sydney. Rebecca and her partner separated and in January 2020 she moved with the boys to St Leonards. She says ‘in a way it was good timing, with covid restrictions allowing time for her and the boys to settle in – and make something of it’. Though ‘it was a difficult time with a stressful separation process underway, home schooling and being a mum at the same time’. Being back with family in St Leonards, her mother, father and three brothers was a great support. The beach also offered solace as a place to walk, collecting things for creative home schooling projects, and creative inspiration.
It was here that Rebecca found her first piece of sea-glass. She rubbed its smoothed, softened and curved surface and thought ‘I’m going to do something with this.’She had ‘visions of organic sculptures and the sea glass sparkling in the wake of the tide inspired the idea of lamps’. ‘A week later I found four buckets of sea-glass at the beach – a gift from the gods’. She started looking for ideas about how to use sea-glass in lead-lighting and found nothing. Not sure if this was because the idea was impossible or original, she eventually enrolled in a stained glass course in Kyneton and travelled there once a week for a two hour class. For her first piece Rebecca undertook the ‘highly experimental and very difficult’ task of a dragon design tiffany lamp in sea-glass. She told herself ‘if I can do this I can do anything’. And she did. ‘It turned out very unique; the kids love it; and so I thought that was a good sign’.
Soon after Rebecca completed NEIS (new enterprise incentive scheme) small business training, and with one dragon lamp to her credit, approached Artisans of Australia in Drysdale about hiring some studio space. Of course they were keen to have her. Rebecca set up her workshop in July 2021 and says she ‘spent the first two days looking out the window, thinking I’m going to have to do something’. A completely random vision of a unicorn inspired her to get started. She started making a whale sculpture, some candle holders and some sun-catchers and sold some pieces at a pop-up market; though admits to having ‘started with no idea of how I was going to sell anything’ she has just begun her third market season. You might find Rebecca and her Sea-glass Creations at Aireys Inlet Market and Eaglenest Gallery; or at Torquay, St Leonards, Portarlington, Drysdale, Anglesea, Geelong Waterfront and Melbourne markets.
Rebecca describes making the sea-glass creation as a ‘meditation process’ where she feels completely connected and so absorbed in the project of the moment that she has on occasion stayed up all night to complete a piece. Rebecca never cuts the glass she finds to fit, but finds the pieces to fit an idea and because of this ‘you never know what it will look like – and then it comes together which is very exciting’. Becoming absorbed is made easier when kitted out in the safety gear of goggles, mask and gloves and being as highly focused as is necessary when working with a soldering iron and hot melted metal’. A lot of what Rebecca does she had to adapt from traditional stained glass techniques or simply make it up.
Rebecca loves the ‘feel of the glass and the stories each piece might tell about where it came from, what it might have been used for, who it might have belonged to and how old it might be. Some of the glass found along the beach inside the bay comes from bottle that could be up to two hundred years old. She is also inspired by the recycled nature of her work, ‘to take these fragments of the past and turn them into a new form, to give them a new life’.
In many respects, the connection Rebecca has with St Leonards not only comes from her family, family stories and a childhood of summers spent at the beach, but it also comes from the stories told though the sea-glass, and retold through her amazing sea-glass creations. ‘My passion is to create lighting and I hope to be developing a range of sea glass pendant lights and lamps in the near future’.
Rebecca’s artwork is truly remarkable and her story helps make our town what it is today. Cheers ‘Bec!
Humans in St Leonards 