Visserij

At the bottom of the garden

It’s funny what a more sober, monk-life existence can lead you to.

The quietness of your surroundings can take the once held energy of journeying through a constant buzz of socialising, and the pressure to bring in a high income to keep your head above water, and turn it into a need to create out of necessity. But nearly a year in a tiny workshop at the bottom of the garden has become a place where that energy has been put back through my fingers at the machine, or cutting many metres of (discarded) fabric and pulling it into shapes for two collections and many objects in between.

I’ve just dropped my second collection for Paris and I see a pattern of references and inspirations in shapes that draw from my hands. The hands and mind that had this quiet repetition steady a nervous system in ways I had never imagined, and opened doors I couldn’t have dreamed up. With a steady rhythm, each couple of weeks references I’d held for over 10 years would be masking-taped onto my workshop wall, where I drew large curves onto my dotted paper. I laid collar lines on my dummy and reworked the profile of curves in my sleeves till they sat just right.

My body has learnt a rhythm of breathing at sunrise and moving and cooking à la carte lunches for my small being, and landing back at my table felt like an additional formula to that practice, that soothed years of self abandonment and brought back safety. I think more of us carry that than ever say out loud, the small daily abandoning of yourself to keep everything else upright. In ways of pleasing my curiosity of what happens if you give up all the things that society thinks are glossy. A nice looking home and a wine in a neighbourhood that is aspirational.

Life is far from that right now, but I’m learning, with this repetition that has fed me in deeper folds, that the two will naturally meet, but in terms that have felt earned, by both the use of my repetitive hands, self work, and a huge amount of focused attention on the work that feels aligned.

This collection is years of unfolding the balance of seeing the two worlds of heritage in my east and west upbringing. The meeting of a Dutch seaman’s turn of a 20th century trouser and the neatness of the angles of a pattern that lays square inspired by the body wraps of the east. Balanced lines and curves that sit off the body in sculptural silhouettes that don’t shout but are noticed by the eyes that observe in a deeper sense.