About … Creating

written for Faire Press Issue 5 | Images by Lean Timms

There’s an eerie quiet that falls over my studio at different times of the day … surrounded by large spotted gums and Jacaranda trees – their canopies in full view through the large glass window – these are the times when birds call come into focus – the squawk of Cockatoos or the rolling conversation of Currawongs or the chatter of Lorikeets clambering over each other in the bottle brush flowers below – these moments draw me out of my computer and throw my vision across to the hill beyond and the water below  -– its smooth today – glassy like a lake … gradually recovering its colour from the influx of fresh water that flooding rains has caused, turning it from grey blue to brown – the clouds are full and set against an aquamarine sky and the sun is crisp and bright and its radiant whiteness fills a corner of my room with warmth as I type.  

The rhythm of creating/making is always with me – like a heartbeat – keeping me company through the big and small moments of my life – fueled by questioning, curiosity, wonder, confusion, connection and a hunger to know more - finding its way to the surface in self-taught stumbles into artistic processes so unfamiliar to me - -firstly expressed in poetry and simple black and white photography, then collecting buttons, buckles, old lace and repurposed vintage dresses, then silk screening (launching my first business in high school – making and selling silk screened shoulder bags) and much later lino cuts and printmaking, textile design, furniture design, and systems thinking

My home in Clareville, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, is nestled between Pittwater on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other.

It is a place of lyric beauty – watching the sun rise on the headland above the beach and feeling the edge of the wild ocean - windswept and wonderful -  the rhythmic beauty of the sea as it makes it way in waves, large and small, to the beach below and watching the starlings ride the air currents against a big Australian sky - or the gentle embrace of the Pittwater side with its quiet tidal sentiment - with untouched vistas of Australian bush off in the distance wrapping the hills and running down to the protected beaches below - only accessible by boat - and further on to the Hawkesbury River beaconing you with its ancient stories – or walking the old smugglers path up the rough stone steps to the lighthouse at Barrenjoey, marking the gateway into this world of water, wind and land where all my treasured places converge. This is the land of the Garigal people.

It is a place of lyric beauty – watching the sun rise on the headland above the beach and feeling the edge of the wild ocean - windswept and wonderful -  the rhythmic beauty of the sea as it makes it way in waves, large and small, to the beach below and watching the starlings ride the air currents against a big Australian sky - or the gentle embrace of the Pittwater side with its quiet tidal sentiment - with untouched vistas of Australian bush off in the distance wrapping the hills and running down to the protected beaches below - only accessible by boat - and further on to the Hawkesbury River beaconing you with its ancient stories – or walking the old smugglers path up the rough stone steps to the lighthouse at Barrenjoey, marking the gateway into this world of water, wind and land where all my treasured places converge. This is the land of the Garigal people.

The natural world is of course, endlessly inspiring, but it can also leave you transfixed, humbled to the point of inaction creatively – sometimes it’s just enough to “bear witness”, to receive, to allow yourself the simple joy of wonder.

My inner musings, whether they be insight, hindsight, or foresight, make their way to the surface in different pathways; they can come “quick-as-a flash” like an epiphany; or it can be a slower realization, over days or months or years hidden in the aquifers of consciousness – the beginning and ending not easily distinguishable – like being transfixed by thick honey slowly moving down a spoon. I’ve never seen myself as artistic or even identified as an artist – I could never feel that I belonged with the “proper” artists I knew around me – who were trained, confident, driven, expressive, fluid, free – mine was a quieter more flexible form of making and I wasn’t sure what to call it.

A business trip to Japan in my early 20’s had a formulative impact on me - the art of making/giving was almost a meditation there, the unwrapping, the unraveling, the layering and the ceremony of presenting creative work – which respected and honoured both the creator and the recipient. As a consequence, even my professional work became a gift of service.

These patterns of the natural world, what repeats and what connects, have fascinated me since childhood – and they translate seamlessly into the decorative play of fabric design – from the first rough sketch to the carving of lino cut and the crafting of the pattern repeat and then the final fabric design development – the whole process is a celebration of what feeds me creatively – a meditation of geometry and story, of texture and time.

Every fabric design is layered with stories and and reflects my love of decorative arts and the diversity of influences it represents - I’ve always been drawn to the flux of artistic movements – art nouveau, art deco and the early modernists or clusters of creatives like the Bloomsbury or Bauhouse polymaths or the organic furniture design of Alvro Aalto, Eilleen Grey, Gaudi.

My mother’s style was beautiful and balanced – she had grace and warmth and an eye for curating a sublime space – with a mix of Chinese and French notes and grounded in an English love of those extra touches that make an experience memorable – the ritual of service. Everyone who came to our home felt at home and felt listened to – she could famously make a batch of scones while the kettle boiled.

When she passed away I became the caretaker of her recipe book and I have been working my way through the cryptic scribble and bringing back to life the food memories of my formative years – during Covid lockdown I packaged up these bakery treats and left them as care packages at people’ door – keeping family ties together and checking in on the younger and older in the community. Like many it seemed appropriate during this time, to shift gear to a practical creativity – I made clothes for my granddaughter and tried my hand at weaving on a small loom and rekindled my love of branch weaving.

To my father thought and action were inextricable linked – I learned from a young age that any idea that came to you was for meant you – it was meant for YOU to do. And if you didn’t know how, then you were meant to learn.  He used to say “you have to take responsibility for your ability”. I came to understand, first-hand, that an idea will change you as you seek to bring it to life.

We were always encouraged to observe, question, consider, reflect – what would we do? How could it be done better? It was in this environment that we all came to learn the practical process of bringing an idea to life – on reflection this was early training in entrepreneurship.  I didn’t realise till later that not all families had these conversations – that we were an “ideas” factory.

When my son Ben was 10 months old I went to live in Philadelphia. Distanced from my family and my career and feeling very isolated in my new role as mother, I found myself searching for something to fill the empty spaces in my day.

I found an art supply shop and was drawn to a set of carving tools and brown squares of lino. When I returned home I transferred a rough sketch from my journal across to this new medium. Firstly, I cut away the lines and then later realised, that it was the spaces that I needed to remove. This may seem so obvious but for me I was just finding my way through the skills I would need – I didn’t know the proper way to do things so I didn’t have to measure up or reach a standard of performance – I could just play experiment, experience in the quietness and solitude of these stolen moments – in a place far away in a world so unfamiliar. I had a vision of representing key moments in my everyday life – I began adding words and stories and layering on colour with two or three rollers of ink. I was finding my voice, my story, and developing a rougher more impressionistic style as I went.

I have learnt to create where I find myself – my process is very mobile – as the children grew up I continued to hand print in the kitchen – playing with colour on different rollers as night fell around me – it was so quiet and so accessible – the sink so close at hand to wash the ink and lino cuts – back then I had an old thick marble table in the center of the kitchen (like a butchers block) which was strong and held fast with every stroke of the rollers - I’ve never printed on a press .

Motherhood seemed to create the perfect environment for me to record my more personal creative side. It gave me the philosophical distance, emotional closeness and physical tiredness to express life from a different perspective. Of course, it’s hard to know how effectively you are really communicating when you’re working in isolation. The layers of process in lino cut printing  (carving the image out - back to front and inside out - and then printing to bring the image back around the right way) kept my inner critic silent – it provided me with the right balance, enabling me to be vulnerable and open without being timid, self-critical, stuck.

I love it when the idea of creativity is freed from its art sector home - when it flows freely into all the corners of our life experience. It brings the opportunity to revisit old assumptions, to look at things afresh, to question myself anew and this is a joyous rhythm for me.

Unraveling the meeting of my professional persona and my personal creative work has taken a little time, as they most often exist in separate worlds (LinkedIn and Instagram) – it is a natural progression to enable these worlds to converge and not be limited by the platforms we use to connect with the world. In truth I have never seen my printmaking and textile design as a “side-hustle” to my professional branding and strategic work – they are equally important to me. As is the home-baker side of my story, working with flavours, textures and shapes as a colour palette.

There’s an old marina in Careel Bay – where the graceful wooden boats from the 1940’s 50s and 60’s (Halvorsens) are moored – the deck of the marina is bleached silvery grey by sun and wind and it sits close to the water’s edge. I can work there, largely undisturbed and order chai from the small kiosk – the soft warm wind buffets your hair as it rounds the corner of the bay – you’re surrounded by boats of all different sizes gently moving on their anchor back and forth with the wind  – and pelicans gracefully gliding by or taking off into the bright sky beyond – their silhouette with their large unraveled wingspan sublimely beautiful  – riding the wind currents off in the distance – and the sound of kayak paddles punctuating the water in large droplets.  

Later in my life, my creative process kept me on track through the strange newness of being in my skin without the responsibilities of motherhood ... the eerie feeling of blindly sensing the boundary of oneself and finding it to be much smaller, closer than you had puffed it up to be ... to do the job at hand. I’m grateful for the creative community worldwide I’ve been able to connect from the early years of Instagram and see my friends like @LuisaBrimble, @AnnabelleHickson, @LeanTimms @finea_studio @Elene_Guereta find and magnify their rich and wondrous gifts as time has progressed. I was privileged to learn from them through Beth Kirby’s slow living workshops in Venice, Formentera, Byron Bay.  

We are all battle weary, of course, because we all carry our scares of trying and failing, of heartbreak and loss, of not being heard or seen but this mustn’t define us.

There is an aspect of love that requires us to become bigger than we are, to be courageous - to stretch, to connect, to belong, to be able to say … what needs to be said; to recognise the significant moments and seize them, to reassure, to not let them pass, to motivate, to learn, to inspire, AND to create. I think love ought to challenge us in this way, to call forth something more in us, don’t you?  Not lie latent, inhabiting only potential.

Perhaps it is this aspect of Love that pushes us forward – the courage to keep going that provides the fertile ground for passion rather than the other way around. If there is no will, no reaching, no stretching into unknown and unmapped areas then over time a complacency and cynicism comes to live in the corners of our thoughts and connections and things starts to fade, inextricably, slowly, gently ... away.

The evening is cool and still and the boo-book owl is sending its clockwork hoot across the empty night and my fingers are tapping an alternative beat as the letters find their way to the page …

I’m mindful of the need to keep being open to the creative process, keep showing up for yourself – this is best expressed in the now famous exchange between legendary choreographer Martha Graham and dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille – which describes so well

about our FABRIC BY THE METRE

hand screen-printed in Australia in small limited edition runs twice a year

The current fabric designs which will be available over the next few months are Gum Nutty, Weave, Banksio on Italian linen. (approx 1400m wide) Read more about our fabric design series here

about our Lino cuts

hand printed in small editions of 20

Our linocuts often tell a story - about relationships, domestic life or motherhood or home. They often feature a blend of colours which is hand mixed at the time of printing so no two linocuts in and edition are ever exactly the same. Read more about our lino cuts here

about our tea towels

100% High quality linen from Eastern Europe

Twice a year we create a limited edition tea towel. The design is often requested from our instagram community. Each tea towel is a standard 50 x 70 cm size and features a side loop for hanging and also quick drying. The pattern is centered on the tea towel.

ABOUT OUR CUSHIONS

It’s important to us that you receive a quality product.

Our cushions are all Australian-made with an invisible zip and piping in a contrasting pattern but the same colourway. The fabric is screen printed in a small studio in Petersham and the cushions are sewn in Freshwater by Rachelle Eduard-Betsy. For any specific colour requests please contact us directly.