Nicole Viney Jewellery

Born in Cloncurry. Made in Tasmania.

Two landscapes. A lifetime of texture, colour and memory. One jeweller who carries them both.

Nicole Viney was born in Cloncurry, Queensland and grew up in Tasmania. Between the raw earthy colours of the outback and the soft, cool greens of Central Coast, she found her creative language. Cloncurry shaped her earliest memories: ancient colours, big textures, and unfiltered light. Tasmania shaped what came after. Together they’ve quietly informed her work.

Nicole had planned to follow the family tradition of becoming a nurse. In 2006 she had an opportunity to spend time in a jewellery studio and suddenly she was at a crossroads: continue down the path of a nursing career, or follow her creative dreams… She fell into it organically and there was no going back.

“I’ve always been super creative, super hands-on,” she says. “I think this was actually my calling all along. I just didn’t know it.”

Two decades later, she’s now at Turner’s Beach, raising her children and running one of the most reputable, distinctive jewellery studios in Tasmania: by appointment, by design, and entirely on her own terms.

“I get to make beautiful things that become people’s treasures. Things that are significant to them. That’s what I get to do for a living.”

Learning to make something that lasts

Renowned Tasmanian Jeweller Rob Mitchell was Nicole’s mentor for fifteen years. He gave her two things she’s leant on ever since: exceptional technical skill, and an inquisitive mind. She completed her formal training in 2009. The bench, the torch, the hand tools, and of course the techniques unchanged in centuries, demanding something exquisite of the maker.

“Stillness,” she says. “You’ve got to have stillness of the mind, the hands, the eye. Everything has to be still and present at once.”

Stillness is not just a technical necessity. It is a way of being, one that connects naturally to the life she’s built here. The creative calm of her place, close to family, collaborators and coast, feeds directly into her work. A connected community of business and lifestyle, she says, works extraordinarily well.

By 2021 she was a member of the Gold and Silversmith Guild. But the recognition that has always mattered most is quieter: clients who came back, pieces passed down, families followed from engagement ring to wedding band to the piece that celebrates a new baby.

People come to Nicole because they know she cares. They stay for the beauty and web of history she creates for them.

The shop, the studio, the switch

Nicole’s business tracked a path many recognise: a pop-up that worked, a shopfront that thrived, and then the slow creep of unsustainable busyness. The pop-up was meant to last three months. Seven years later, she had five employees, a destination shop people planned visits around, and overheads that quietly consumed everything the success created.

Nicole’s business needs peaceful conditions where beauty can happen. She had too much unproductive time, she says, “which just didn’t add up.” Her output was suffering, as was she. Life often clarifies decisions already made. When her brother passed away in Cloncurry, Nicole had already chosen a new direction. The loss made it certain.

The move to a boutique, appointment-only studio was not a retreat. It was a recalibration. She overhauled her digital presence, connected social media to her website, set up online booking and quoting, and built an e-commerce platform that works while she is at the bench.

“The shop was for the people. The studio is for me.”

She could work 80 hours a week. She chooses not to. Nicole has clients statewide, interstate, and internationally: consulting via video call, sketching designs in real time, shipping jewellery across the world. The studio is smaller. The reach is larger.

Two landscapes in metal

Nicole lives and mines the North-West coast, metaphorically and practically. The cowrie and abalone shells in her Venus Collection are gathered by family, friends, and clients from beaches around Tasmania, cast directly into gold and silver, the texture of the coastline locked into the metal. Her Homage Collection features rare Tasmanian sapphires and zircons, personally sourced for their provenance as much as their beauty.

In 2026, twenty years after leaving Queensland, Nicole returned to Cloncurry: a journey seen through adult eyes, shaped by love, loss, and two decades of distance. She found the landscape waiting, unchanged. Raw ochre tones, ancient earthy warmth she had carried in memory without realising it. She brought home red Queensland boulder opals and outback sapphires that speak in the colours of that place. They now appear alongside her Tasmanian materials, the warm earth of the outback meeting the soft cool tones of the coast in a single piece.

Nothing is rushed. Everything is considered.

Nicole Viney Jewellery isn’t a gallery you browse. It’s a conversation you start. Bespoke commissions, heirloom remodels, ready-to-wear collections in small runs: each piece made by hand, for a person, with a story already waiting to attach itself.

Born in Queensland, grown in Tasmania, this artist found her calling by accident and her home on purpose. She built something that carries both, without rushing either.

The Central Coast has a way of doing that.

For more of Nicole's story visit Nicole Viney Jewellery

Images courtesy of Taylor Paige Photo & Film