Pattern Play: Olivia Chan Creates One-of-a-Kind Jewels with Australia’s Finest Opals

What does Olivia Chan see when she looks into an opal? Koi fish, peacock feathers, oceans and the Northern Lights are just some of the worlds she has discovered within Australia’s national gemstone. During my recent trip to Sydney, I met the jeweller and collector whose eye for the finest Australian opals is matched by an imagination that allows their unique colours, patterns and movement to guide the jewels she creates.

Reading the soul of an opal, I soon discover, requires knowledge and imagination. Olivia Chan knows how to assess the quality of a stone, but when she lays out a succession of Australian opals in front of me, she is just as interested in what she sees within them. Some blaze with red and gold; others swirl with electric blues and greens or are divided into broad, painterly planes of colour. Hold them to the light and they shift again, revealing colours and patterns that disappear and reappear with the slightest movement of the hand. “Each opal is like a human being with its own personality,” Olivia tells me. “Some opals make me think about a kind of bird, others of the ocean. I read the opal first and then I design around it.”

How It All Began

Olivia's knack for uncovering stories in gemstones makes more sense when you discover that jewellery was not her first creative career. Born in Guangdong in southern China, she moved to Beijing to study Film and Television at the Communication University of China before working at a national television station, where she made documentaries and travel programmes. She later completed a Master’s degree in Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

She believes both experiences influence the way she works today. Film gave Olivia a means of expressing herself visually, while anthropology taught her to look closely and understand what she was seeing. Her Chinese heritage is another important part of her creative identity, although she sees her influences as extending beyond any one culture. A broader Eastern sensibility can also be seen in her appreciation of nature, symbolism, atmosphere and storytelling, all of which find their way into her work. It wasn’t until she moved to Australia, however, that she found a gemstone that brought those instincts together.

When she arrived in Australia, Olivia had already worked with diamonds, rubies and sapphires, but she was not so familiar with the country’s opals. That quickly changed once she began handling them. “An opal has neither a fixed colour nor a static face,” she says. “It can resemble a painting, yet it moves. It can feel cinematic, yet there is no director.” It is safe to say she fell in love with them immediately.

A Collector’s Eye for Opal

Keen to share her collection with me during our meeting in Sydney, Olivia introduced me to an impressive variety of gems in her possession, starting with a long, slender opal awash with salmon pink, blue and flashes of vivid green. It is an older crystal opal from Mintabie, a historic Australian opal field that is no longer commercially mined, making fine material from the area increasingly difficult to find. Olivia tells me that Mintabie crystal opals can have a character all their own, and this stone’s translucent body and soft, almost dreamlike colours immediately caught her eye. To her, its unusual silhouette resembles “a dreamy fish from another world”. For the moment, it remains unset as she considers what it might eventually become.

Beside it, Olivia shows me three dark Australian opals that could hardly be more different. One is a large oval, alive with violet and electric blue, another is an almost rectangular boulder opal, and a third black opal is organic in shape, with neon colours igniting beneath its surface. The black opals come from the famous Lightning Ridge opal field, which is renowned for producing some of Australia’s most valuable opals, yet each has its own completely individual combination of colour and pattern. “What makes an opal special is the pattern, the way the colour is ‘printed’,” she explains. “For example, red is the rarest and most precious colour in Australian opals. But it's not just the colour, it's the way the colours play together.”Brilliance, however, comes before any of these considerations. “Brilliance is always the first thing I look for when selecting an opal,” Olivia adds.

The Most Precious Opal Patterns

Once she has established that a stone has the brilliance she is looking for, Olivia is particularly drawn to distinctive patterns. Harlequin and Peacock are two of the rarest and most valuable patterns found in fine Australian opal, and she has an extraordinary example of the latter in her collection. Set into a diamond pendant, its electric blues, turquoise, green and violet radiate across the opal like the fanned feathers of a peacock. “This is the only peacock opal I have seen with such a uniform pattern,” she says. “Some people have told me they have seen this pattern before, but never as even as this one.” 

The next black opal immediately reminds me of an abstract painting. Weighing 8.21 carats, its flagstone pattern creates broad planes of intense blue, turquoise and green that look as though they have been daubed across the stone. Olivia’s imagination, however, takes her somewhere else entirely. Looking into the opal, she sees a planet from high above, with deep blue oceans, green continents and light moving across the horizon like the aurora.

It’s All About the Quality

Finding the Right Design for an Opal

Once she acquires an opal, she is in no hurry to decide its future. Olivia will spend time turning it under different lights, watching how the colours move and finding the angles at which it looks its best. Only then does she begin to consider a design. “Each stone tells me what it wants to be,” she says, with even the type of jewel dictated by the stone. “Some are good for pendants because when you make a pendant, you can see the most colour. Others are better for rings because when you wear a ring, you can see the colour play and watch it yourself. A pendant is for others to admire, but a ring is for you to enjoy.”

The same thinking determines what, if anything, Olivia places alongside an opal. A pink diamond might pick up a flash of colour within one stone yet distract from another. Sometimes coloured gemstones are called for, sometimes diamonds, and occasionally Olivia decides the opal needs nothing more than gold. What I like about Olivia’s approach is that she never tries to compete with the opal. Its colour, pattern and movement have already been determined by nature, and she has no desire to impose an idea that fights against them. “I want the design to grow from the stone, rather than forcing the stone to conform to a design,” she explains.

As Olivia begins gathering the opals and her designs in front of us, I find myself marvelling at just how different they all are. A peacock, a distant planet, a fantastical fish – each began as something nature created without any idea of what a human eye might eventually find within it. Olivia has built her career around that act of looking, recognising the possibilities in every opal and allowing the stone to guide what follows.

In doing so, she is also celebrating the incredible natural riches of her adopted country, driven by a desire to show the world just how extraordinary Australian opals can be.