Marlie Reinhard is a jeweller and artist working in Naarm/Melbourne.

Her practice explores intimacy, protection, restraint and the body through objects that occupy a space between adornment, armour and artefact.

Working predominantly in precious metal and stones, Reinhard is drawn to forms that hold, enclose, bind and protect. Brutalist architecture, ritual objects and the visual language of restraint inform a practice in which hardness and tenderness are rarely opposites.

Her recent work has become increasingly concerned with the structures we build around intimacy: the boundaries that allow vulnerability, the weight of being held, and the complicated relationship between protection and restriction.

These ideas emerge through making as much as intention. Repeated forms - walls, points, enclosures, tension and contained spaces - have become a way of examining relationships to the body, to others and to the self.

Hardt is the evolving body of work through which these questions are given physical form.