On becoming

It’s the hardest part. I much prefer it when beginnings sneak up and ambush me, so that I am already half way through beginning before I even realise that I have begun. I am wrestling with point number 2 on my List of Things To Do This Year. It’s looming. Ominously. And still the spreadsheet is conspicuously empty. I know very little about marketing but the usual tactics that I have been advised to follow hold little attraction for me. To try and break the deadlock, I have invested in Story Driven by Bernadette Jiwa. I follow her blog and find her ideas and insights very thought provoking. On the front of the book she says, “you don’t need to compete when you know who you are.” Oh how that appeals, so I don’t find myself comparing my following on Instagram and Facebook and worrying about how, now that I have only gone and asked her to create a pattern, I am going to promote Ajda’s work so she can raise the funds to study special effects make up at the Iver Academy. She’s really very, very good; the films of the future need her.

The first of five questions Bernadette Jiwa’s Story Driven Framework asks is, “What’s been the making of you? What’s your Backstory, your journey to now?” Well, I’ve never really thought of my journey as particularly worth recounting outside my own circle, being as it is a series of stuttering steps that somehow have landed me very happily dreaming up patterns and agonisingly writing a Musing every two weeks. Except that maybe it is. The beginning began long before On meaning when one day I found myself suddenly saying across the computer screens to my friend and colleague R, “I’m thinking of taking voluntary redundancy to go and study Art History.” And there it was. Out in the open and made real. I had been wanting to make a change for some time but had no idea what it was I wanted to change to. I’d long had an interest in art and design but didn’t really think that it was an area in which I would or could work. Having made the pronouncement, I surprised myself by finding it was exactly what I wanted to do. After some research, I decided to study the History of Modern and Contemporary Art mainly because I knew so very little about it and also because I held rather a dim view of contemporary art in particular. The experience was both terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure, and crucially safely academic. Emersion in visual culture and the placing of it in historical and political context banished my prejudices about what art could be and what art should say. On graduation, I was fortunate to intern with Adrian Sassoon and with freelance curator Brian Kennedy, which deepened my understanding of how artists use objects to communicate subtly often complex ideas and social commentary.

And then I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The following year or so was taken up with surgeries and treatment and the beginnings of the long slow process of recovery. It was during this time that I went to see David Hockney: A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy in London. In the profusion of works, the saturated hues seemed almost to leap off the walls at me. I reeled from room to room, drinking in the myriad of shades of purples and reds, browns and greens, my eyes hardly wide enough to encompass the variety and intensity of colour. I finally truly understood Paul Klee – “Color is the place where our brain and the Universe meet.” I have not experienced immersion in colour in that same intense, almost out of body, way since. But I have become more attuned to the effect of colour on me, both in what I wear and in the hues, shades, and tones I surround myself with.

Some little time after visiting the exhibition, having had an interest in interiors and interior design since a very young age, I started to work at a fabric showroom. It was here I fell hopelessly madly in love with textiles for their ability to envelope you both in colour and in texture; for their transformative power; and, most especially, for their gentle and oftentimes covert mode of storytelling. And because everyone uses textiles. Here is art you can touch, wear, curl up in, sit on. Here is something that can actively enrich your life, if you choose the hues, shades, and tones that truly appeal to you rather than following the dictates of fashion.

Another seemingly stray thought brought me to actually designing my own textiles. I had finally found the reason.