English never met a noun it didn’t want to adopt. It has words for drizzle, shower, downpour, mist, mizzle (surprised?…me too) sleet and hail – which feels like overkill for something I’d happily live without – but it still leaves some fairly inconvenient holes. English has a word for the smell of rain on […]
Imagine you’re a word, and you’re choosing your final resting place – are you nestling into a soft bed of linen? Or sliding around on polyester? My confession before we get to the poem part: the paper it ends up living on has had a previous career. THE PAPER HISTORY For most of […]
There’s a name for what happens when language stops being information, when it moves beyond story and starts being a vibe. I’ve been calling it poetry design. It isn’t a movement yet. If I have my way, it will be. Not to be a gatekeeper: to invite participation. If you’ve ever walked into a room […]
WORDS FOR WALLS – STUDIO NOTE Words belong not just in books, but on walls. Words for Walls came into view after I had started giving language a personality and it was begging to go on the wall. I took note. It became clear to me that, as an artist, language was my medium […]
A MODERN RITUAL OF GRATITUDE AT THE TABLE I grew up in a fruit shop. I didn’t work, I ate. When our bucolic family was wrangled indoors, think; lots of boisterous male energy and one baby female in semi-rural New Zealand, we gathered around the table. In our household we had a daily format with […]
A COLOUR DOWNLOAD WITH NEW ZEALAND DESIGNER EVIE KEMP Evie Kemp first came to my attention when I moved back to New Zealand a few years ago. Friend and interior designer, Kate Raney from North Carolina said to me, with much hope and enthusiasm, ‘are you friends with Evie Kemp?!’ Since then I have followed […]
HOW TABLE TOP DESIGN IS THEATRE FOR YOUR HOME Look around–what’s on your table? Your dining room table. Is it poppies in fresh bloom. Tiny piles of petals dropping from your thirsty pompom dahlias. Poetry perhaps, or finely chosen candlesticks holding the faint smell of expended wax and cypress oil. Maybe you have a bowl […]
Back to The Journal I’M HERE EVANGELIZING ABOUT COLOR – THINK OF ME AS YOUR COLOR JESUS It’s true that Chat GPT recently described my Instagram feed as a modern art exhibit that forgot to take its ADHD meds, ‘like you’re the Dr Phil of the color spectrum’. I’m not shy, I’ll take it. I’m […]
Recently one night, like a spirit had descended on me, I decided I wanted to be a salonniere. Is this even a word? Was my habit of making up words to fill in the gaps of my moth eaten 90’s French playing tricks on me? Unsure, I asked aunty Google and ended up on a […]
