This is one of Hosking's themes, capturing light on the surface of her objects, through piercing, raisings, positive and negative marks that shift in value with the changing light, like a school of fish changing direction in a flash.
Jackie Cooper
Hosking's practice focuses upon the embodiment of the personal meaning of place in intimate objects, with particular reference to place as landscape. Her work is characterised by an extraordinary depth of research into the history, languages and processes of jewellery and silversmithing: the domain of the intimate object. The potential for the miniature to act as a 'souvenir' or paradigm for such ideas has led to it becoming the primary mode employed by Hosking.
The low-fi technology of the hand-made is an essential component of Hosking's work. She works with casting techniques alongside fine sawpiercing and riveting in her silverwork, often spending weeks on a single piece. Earthy patinas are built up on the surface of the silver with heat and chemical processes, each bearing its own distinctive character. More recent works have seen Hosking embrace the particularities of the original materials; mainly Australian timbers, small sections of which she frames, either literally with silver or figuratively with the small scale of jewellery.
Marjorie Simon writes "Somewhere along a continuum from representation (mimesis) to abstraction, Hosking takes control of the image and idea, the way a photographer or filmmaker controls access to a larger picture. Even something that appears to be completely mimetic, such as a Buchan fern brooch, actually selects out a portion for us to see. Because of the tendency of the human mind to complete a (familiar) object, "a partial obhect can... stand in for something that is not - or is no longer - present and available"