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Some of you may know, and others not, that I signed the lease on this studio almost seven months pregnant with my first child, on the threshold of motherhood, and riding a potent wave of equal parts transformation ––– embodying the literal alchemic weaving of nothing into something ––– and delusion.
Because I couldn’t know how much my life was going to change. Nor how far the studio and my own creative practices would be from my new reality.
Three years ago we got the keys. A few weeks prior, a few minutes from our new home, I had seen a handwritten sign on the door of an ex-estate agent office which scrawled, “for rent” and there outside on the bike rack, working my way through a supersize bag of those black tortilla chips, I perched, looking through the window with a piece of paper on which I drew the layout, the furniture, everything I wanted it to be. I handed this piece of paper to my partner and said, “I really, really think we should do this.” So we did. Well, he did at first ––– I don’t think there is a single surface in this space that he didn’t pour hours of time into making functional or beautiful in those initial months.
Three years later, life has ebbed and flowed and the studio too, it’s had its own current. Never quite the vessel for my own productivity that my three-year-ago-two-children-ago-self foretold (the delusion!) but a space that I’m often so generously told is special; one that people are overwhelmingly kind about and glad to find in Kennington. One that began to draw in all kinds of wonderful people who lived around us. And that ended up being the whole point: we took a chance make make an offering to the area, to create something we would want to find right here, and in turn it’s become the thing I needed most; not a space to be highly productive, at least in these newborn years, but a connection point, the thing that has rooted us to this place.
So after a summer on hiatus, we are reopening ––– and my attention is on making this even more of a gathering place.
Select classes and courses are resuming, but I’m also hosting regular Open Studios starting next weekend, launching a supper club in the Autumn, and most importantly, opening the studio to you via self-directed Studio Sessions –––––––––––––– find everything below.
And I would love for it all to continue to grow in ways that form deeper roots. So please share with me ––– what do you want to see more of? Do you have something you’d like to do together? You can reply directly to this message and I’ll receive it. Thank you for reading (you made it to the end) and for being part of it all —
Hattie x
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