Welcome to Amiyo, this beautiful life...

I’m so thrilled to finally share with you something incredible I’ve been working on for one of my beautiful clients. It’s been an amazing intuitive journey together, from beginning as mentoring sessions in 2017 through to bringing her latest collection into the world and sharing it through its very own online space…

Susie Duggin is an incredible artist, jewellery designer, and maker based in Bangalow, near Byron Bay here on the east coast of Australia. We met back in 2017 when Susie flew down to Sydney for our first mentoring session together. She has such a beautiful and distinctive aesthetic, and was in the midst of creating the most stunning debut jewellery collection The Native Gold Series, where each piece is art in miniature.

The name Amiyo came into Susie’s life while she was creating the collection and for her she describes this as an ancient word that portrays “this beautiful life, enriched by our dreams and visions, made to be a touchstone to remind us of our inherent magic.”

Each piece features native gold in quartz stones that are sourced locally, and carries its own story which is reflected in the names of each piece: “Landscape of the Soul” , “The Beloved One”, and “In The Sky, On The Ground (and in the Sea)” , just to name a few.

Together over the past few months we’ve been designing and styling her new website, and it was an absolutely pleasure to create the visual storytelling, capturing the magic in this collection. Susie came and stayed at my studio and we spent the weekend photographing the pieces in the studio and down by the waters edge too.

After a wonderfully successful, private launch last weekend, it’s my absolute pleasure to be the first to share with you her collection online. So please take the time to visit her world, read her journal, learn more about her and share her work with people you know will love it…

Congratulations beautiful Susie! It’s been such a pleasure mentoring and collaborating with you on this creative endeavour. The intuitive journey is a jungle path for sure and worth every step when you see what you’ve created led by your heart all the way. This is real magic in the palm of your hands, and you’ve shared it with us, there is nothing more special than this.

With love,

Pia xx

Website design & styling by Pia Jane Bijkerk and Susie Duggin

Production and visual storytelling by Pia Jane Bijkerk

Logo Design by Rick Shearman

Jewellery photography by Michelle Eabry

When you're entire mailing list of 10 years has been wiped, what do you do?

You realise how determined you are to share your creativity with the world, so you dust yourself off and start a new one. Nothing and no one can bring this girl down.

If you’d like to hear the full story and subscribe to receive my heart-written letters, you can do so right here:

I take my time to write these emails to connect you to your heart: That part of you that speaks in whispers and needs more than ever right now to be heard & valued. I have so much coming up this year that I’m eager to share via this special connection. I’ll also post here in my journal, but the emails are more intimate and special, it’s where the magic begins - you get a glimpse of it here on the journal, but it gets activated through the emails.

A massive thank you to those who have resubscribed or subscribed if you weren’t on my mailing list already since I temporarily lifted my social media hiatus to put the call out this week. You are part of this new start! The beautiful messages of support coming through have made me more invigorated than ever to write and send my first email tomorrow with the new moon. I have learnt so much about myself over the past 24 hours that has made it worth it - yes, you read right, worth it.

With Love,

Pia xx

When I was nineteen...

When I was 19, I thought of myself as a worldly feminist. It was 1997. I was halfway through my university degree in Sydney, and already by that age I had travelled the world and lived in more countries than most people visit in a lifetime. Between the ages of 13-15 I lived in a village in northern Italy and was appalled by the sexism that ran rampant in the culture…why did that old man just pinch my bum? Why is it ok that those boys are whistling at me as I eat ice cream with my parents? And why does that newsreader on TV have her body squeezed into that tiny dress and her breasts pushed up to her chin? When she speaks, why is she trying to seduce her viewers? What I saw and experienced felt very strange to me. I struggled to integrate. And it was this reaction that defined me as a feminist.

As I grew into this label, it made me feel different to the other girls around me, like I must be less naïve, less vulnerable than them. After all, I was worldly, and I was apparently a feminist because I believed women deserved the same rights as men. It made me feel strong.

On top of being worldly and a feminist, I was also experiencing deep love with another human, my boyfriend. And although we had our ups & downs as young lovers do, fumbling our way along the paths that others had paved for us to walk, I knew what it was to be in love, and this made me feel not just worldly, but also, mature. So here I was at age 19: a worldly, mature feminist. In the cocoon of this understanding of myself, I felt safe.

Then something happened that shattered my world…

……………………………………………..

This is an extract from a very personal piece I wrote on Monday, August 12 & Tuesday, August 13, which, as it turned out, was the beginning of the full moon phase. I have never had the words to express what happened at this time in my life, and in the early hours of Monday morning, I had a beautiful dream. During the dream, the words formed. Although the nature of the event is traumatic, I followed my intuition and took the time on Tuesday to write it all out. It is incredibly personal, and after writing it I realised my website is not the place to publish it. I may, in time, consider publishing this piece in a publication as I know it is powerful and needs to be read by as many young women as possible, in the hope they may understand how to listen to their intuition. For now, it is available to read in full in my patreon collective. And I’ve also made it available on my new password protected journal, for those who are on my mailing list.

“Does your family have secrets? Or maybe you have a secret from your own life experience that you have never shared with anyone? Today Pia and Shona talk about the undeniable link between secrets and shame and how this can stop us from being truly ourselves and also from becoming the strong, powerful women we were meant to be.”

Secrets & Shame is the latest podcast episode on It’s All Up From Here! Click here to listen xx

New Work: Mud Play for Happi Kids

Laly in her mud pit making a Mud Café…

A diary of a worm, something we had a lot of fun working on together and included playing with real worms found in the garden.

In April this year I got one of the most wonderful photographic story commissions for a magazine I’ve ever had… when I read the phrases in the email “make things with mud”, “kids getting dirty”, “do you love the subject?” I barely held back my excitement and I was quick to reply YES! It ticked all the boxes for me and I couldn’t wait to schedule it in & get thinking on what I could create for this story for the summer issue of Happi Kids.

Do you remember when Laly was around 2 years old, I made her - by hand, spending no money (yes I’m proud!) - a sandpit in our back garden? Here is the post to jog your memory. Well, she’s now a regular beach goer, no longer afraid of the vastness of the ocean and loves ‘surfing’ on her body board. She’d outgrown her mini backyard beach so, inspired by the story for this shoot and in need of the perfect location, I turned the sand pit into a mud pit! I dug out the sand, and collected some buckets of dirt from the back area where our first chickens used to roam (we now have chickens again, but that’s another post for another time! We may live in the city, but that hasn’t stopped us from creating a mini farm it seems). I cleared the area around the pit and planted a few hardy flowers and pretty palms. I needed to create a space big enough for a couple of kids to play in, as well as a painting area. It was a lot of fun to build this set, gathering vintage kitchenware for the mud cafe, and mixing mud with beetroot, spinach and turmeric to create mud paint. I spent a glorious hour or two by myself making the tiny mud house (inner child meets grown up job - the best)…

I had three wonderful young models for this shoot. With the fabulous production assistance from my friend Celia, she found two boys from Laly’s school, Zephyr and Luka, who came over with their mums Eliza and Narelle, one afternoon and basically hung out in the mud for 3 hours while I snapped shots of them playing. I only needed 3 hero shots from the boys, but there were many more created, they had so much fun and it was pure joy to capture them in action. I don’t think they could quite believe that this was a real job, and all they had to do was play and cover themselves in mud! Shona was my styling and photography assistant for the afternoon, so it was certainly a relaxed and joyful shoot…

Zephyr painting with mud!

Luka and Zephyr following my instructions to get dirty!

The boys making ‘dirty denim’ with some op shop denim clothes I sourced for the shoot.

Luka loved making mud ice creams.

Zeph covered in mud and pretty happy about it!

At the end of the shoot, while Zephyr’s mum Eliza was hosing him down, I saw him look up at his mum and say “I will never forget this day!”. My heart exploded.

The next day was Laly’s turn, and she took on her role with not just enthusiasm but surprising skill, as she doubled as my photographic assistant as well, helping me set up certain shots and gathering materials, and restyling the props when needed. This is the first time she’s worked with me or seen me work as I have only ever brought her with me to a shoot once - when she was 6 months old, and it was a disaster, so I never did it again! Until now, at 7 years of age. She was so great, and I think I may have myself an ongoing assistant for as long as she finds joy in it! I’ve noticed she’s a natural behind the camera actually - she took a video of her friend the other day singing, and I couldn’t believe how still she kept the camera and how she followed her friend around, patient and mindful of how she was placed within the frame - there were even natural light flares from the sun, it was like a professional film, I couldn’t believe it! I’ve never taught her so I was pretty blown away - let’s just say she gets that from me, because as we know, it’s not one of Romain’s many talents.

Mud sandwich anyone? A bit of stale bread and some pretend ‘micro herbs’, yum!

Having so much fun making sand slime!

The article is out now in the Dutch edition, summer issue. And I cannot recommend highly enough to play in mud. I may even turn it into a mud bath for myself, that will be some serious earthing!! Ha.

Here is the mud-inspired-but-completely-edible energy balls recipe for the article, which I made up from ingredients I had…

INGREDIENTS

1/2 cup  of almond meal
3/4 cup of pitted dates
2 tablespoons of raw cacao powder
1 tablespoon of almond butter (or any nut butter - I used peanut butter which was delicious)
1 tablespoon of coconut oil
Pinch of salt

METHOD

Place the almond meal in the food processor with the dates and coconut oil and pulse until they are nicely crushed. Add the nut butter and cacao and then mix again in the food processor. Add a pinch of salt if desired. Take a tablespoon of the mixture and roll into a ball. Continue doing this until the mixture is finished. Place the rolled balls into the freezer for an hour, then remove and store in an airtight container in the fridge.

Makes 8-12 balls (depending on how big you make them).

A big thank you to everyone who helped me on this shoot: Romain, Laly, Shona, Celia, Eliza, Narelle, Zephyr, and Luka!

With Love,

Pia xx