stories / culture / curiosities / makers / ideas
The echoes of summers past Painting poetry • Travels through time Stories of escape issue 44
What we’re loving A curated selection of what’s in our diaries, shopping baskets and on our minds this issue words frances ambler, bre graham and alice snape
Yes you can Rad Girls Can is seriously making
Make yourself up
us question what we’ve been doing
We’re seriously in love with this brooch designed for the V&A by Mexican jewellery designer Iris De La Torre to accompany their Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up exhibition. Iris’s work combines Mexican folklore with 1960s graphic design.
with our lives. It’s a collection of stories about women who made positive impacts on the world before they were even 20, such as Barbara Rose Johns, whose high school protest helped spark the civil rights movement. Read and be inspired. £12.99, Ten Speed Press
Brooch, £30, vam.ac.uk/shop
Vegan, ethical and hand poured. Good stuff. Amber & Bergamot candle, £12, ohros.com
Riot Days are here Punk, electronica, theatre, activism, and protest merge in Pussy Riot: Riot Days. Following a run at the Photo: Alexander Sofeev
Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the show will be touring the UK. A testament to the power of resistance. UK tour starts 10 August in Edinburgh
The Dora Larsen lingerie collection is all about comfort and fun. Now, we just need to decide which colour combination is our favourite. Prices from ÂŁ32, doralarsen.com
Put a ring on it A unique kit that puts the craft of ring making at your fingertips. Prices from ÂŁ50, www.theworkbenchlondon.com/box
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experience
The waiting game Do you ever get impatient when something seems to take forever? These four women are working on projects that could take ten years, maybe a lifetime or more…
portraits liz seabrook interviews alice snape and terri-jane dow
Lucy Tammam, couture designer and creator of the One Dress project, London I started making this dress in 2016, and I’m not sure exactly when it will be finished. It’s a total labour of love. It will travel all over the world – UK, India, Australia, Kenya – to be embroidered by women with words that define feminism and women’s empowerment. This is a positive representation of women, I want it to tell women’s stories. I thought the dress would be embroidered with 500, maybe 800, words in total, then I started doing it, and I realised that it will more than likely be 2,500. As we’re only 500 words in, we have quite a way to go. Each word is sponsored, so we can pay everyone involved in the embroidery a fair salary. You can pick from a choice of words online [tammam.co.uk/onedress]: equality, sisterhood, respect, love, emancipation, solidarity. Or you can
choose your own, but I don’t want it to be negative. We’ve got different languages, too – Hindi, Telugu, Assamese, Arabic. The shape is inspired by the dress that suffragette Dame Christabel Pankhurst wears in the 1909 Ethel Wright portrait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. But it’s a modernised version with an open back and sheer panels. It’s made using all vintage and reclaimed threads. The threads are all shades of violet. I’m going to put a green lining in, to get the extra Suffragette colour in there, too. The majority of my work has a vintage influence. Certainly in the way that it’s made. That kind of proper couture stitching, everything considered. Provenance has become so important in fashion, people want to know where their clothes came from, that people haven’t been exploited and that it is going to last.
Throwaway fashion, stuff that was only worn once or twice, used to be so big, but I’m glad there is starting to be a shift. One Dress is a statement against that, it’s the antithesis of fast fashion. It’s taking so long to create and it’s also about the stories of the women who are creating it. If you look closely, you can see each word is slightly different, the signature of each embroiderer. I love that you can see it’s handmade. We are recording each and every embroiderer who works on it. It’s an art piece, you know, it’s meant to make a statement. When it is finished, I want it to be worn by a range of inspirational women – to see it on the red carpet would be a dream come true. It will be toured and exhibited in various places, then I hope it will end up in a museum. It’s a piece of history I think.
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In search of lost time Summer holidays used to last forever, now their end comes in a flash. Is it possible to slow our lives back down?
words thea hawlin illustration laxmi hussain
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experience
Summer was endless. Summer was its own country, a haven from the world. Summer was an island, literally for me: Ireland. Every summer from my early childhood was the same. The 5am drive from our central land-locked town to the Welsh port of Fishguard before a ferry at dawn to the mythical sounding Rosslare, where the lanes stank of fresh fish and you could taste salt on your lips. We spent dawn watching the sun rise inky and new over the horizon, and the boat spit foam into the water leaving a giant snail trail through the waves behind us, a white tail in an ocean of blue. Then another drive for (what felt like) many hours to the tiny southern coastal town where my granny’s house stood, all white-washed walls and peeling paint, large bay windows with nooks for curling up with a book and a view straight onto the rocky surf. Summer was a destination, a place we fought to reach, and once found, immense. It was all-encompassing, my giant Irish family (my mother is the youngest of ten), squeezing into my granny’s beach-fronted house. The nettle-infested garage at the back, the rooms crammed with lines of bunk beds like some strange summer camp for cousins: it was heaven. I never wanted to leave. I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers childhood
summers, stretched out for what seemed an eternity. I’m also sure I’m not the only one who resents the feeling that each year summer quickens, skipping with worrying velocity into the following season, then the following year. This feeling isn’t just a feeling. Science says it’s true, time moves faster for us as each year passes. With each year my life will seem to speed up, simply because I’ve lived through a year of experience, another round of familiarity. The “ratio” or “proportional” theory of time has been alive and kicking since 1877, the reasoning being that summer seems long to a child because it’s still a huge percentage of their lived existence. The first time we experience something, the first long summer we can recall, remains set in stone simply because it is the first, the ones that follow blur into each other under the pressure of passing days and repeated experience. Without novelty, time folds in on itself. Repetition makes for a quickened existence it seems. William James, one of the founding fathers of American psychology, declared in 1890: “each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units.” A more recent paper dubs this phenomenon ‘chunking’, the idea being that with the passage of time our brains lump 33
Stretch 2017 Oil on linen
times and sit back on my couch and read, knit and sew. Then I look up and see what’s not sitting well. "I love the strange inexplicable atmospheres that a painting can capture. Often my ideas are triggered by some memory or an actual place that becomes a condensed symbol of a dominant mood at the time – a tiled bathroom, a corner shop window, or a bedroom with a shaft of light. "My 96-year-old mother died earlier this year, she had dementia. I had to be her death maiden; 40
holding her hand while she went through the stages of dying. Much of my recent work has been influenced by this – the female body, the bed in the room, the vigil, and at the same time a refusal of the grimness of death. These new works have several figures in them, I think of them as ghosts. "I have a backlog of ideas that I'd like to turn into paintings – a woman madly eating, a woman kneeling in front of a bed, a woman wringing a towel over a basin, a woman giving a lecture, a woman
culture
Shower, 2016 Oil on linen
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beauty
Moments in make-up Timeless classics, vintage redesigned, future heirlooms, antiques reinvented – products that mark past, present and future photos charlotte may styling river jade gibbs words alice snape and bre graham
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Grandma’s house Photographer Beinta á Torkilsheyggi is capturing the matriarchs of the Faroe Islands in their own homes words and portraits beinta á torkilsheyggi
Every photo tells a unique story of its subject, intimate and beautiful – it’s a brief snapshot into a life. The portraits of these women are simple and honest. I go into their home, we sit and have a cup of tea, they tell stories about their history. We have strong family values in the Faroe Islands. We live close to nature. We have an unspoken tradition where a fisherman gives a farmer fish, then the fisherman gets lamb from the farmer. It’s like this with other kinds of food, too. These women have been wives of fishermen, they have looked after the household. They have experienced the world war, the invention of the car and now some have got their heads around using Skype. But somehow when I enter their home, it’s like taking a step back in time, when a conversation is just the best thing in the world.
Anna, Sandavágur, born in 1928 “I have worked in the local grocery shop all my life and loved chatting to all the locals and knowing everybody in the village.”
curiosities
Augusta, Æðuvík, born in 1921 “Me and my sister Lorensa talk on the phone every day – she knows everything about me.”
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makers
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Whimsical, lush and ornate images adorn the walls of Faye Wei Wei’s studio in south London. We visited the painter to talk about her work, inspired by art history, love and the stories that surround her
words bre graham photos sophie davidson
It’s the middle of a heatwave inside Faye Wei Wei’s studio, which feels like a floralscented sauna. “I mix lavender oil in with my paint,” she says. “It does smell lovely but it makes me sleepy.” Walking into Faye’s world does feel something like a midsummer night’s dream. Sketches are stacked upon a huge grand piano, pages from poetry books are taped to the white walls and smudges of oil paint adorn everything. We sip bottles of icy cold water as we chat on a kimonostrewn sofa. “It’s so hot in this summer heat, I have been practically naked while I’ve been working – and getting covered with the same colours as the painting,” she says as she makes sure my white dress doesn’t end up like one of her canvases. I have loved Faye’s work since I saw her first show in London’s Cob Gallery last year. Her work feels sensitive, personal and with a hint of magic. After graduating from the
Slade School of Fine Art, Faye set up her studio in a room in her south London home. “The best thing that art school teaches you is how to be self-motivated, to work hard, to have a studio and have that studio practice. I’m really lucky to have this space – as you can see, I’m a total hoarder.” “Have you always been like this?” I ask. I am entranced by her manner of speaking. It’s not just her work that has a dreamlike magic, it exudes from the artist, too. “I wanted to do everything. I would joke about wanting to be a dancer or an actor as well, or a cook, or just live in the wild, but I think painting was just always something I wanted to do. I have a memory from when I was younger of feeling really satisfied with a painting that I’d done. I painted a vase of flowers when I was in year three at school, and I remember finding it so amazing that you could look at a flower or a leaf and
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#onegoodthing Getting up early and feeling like you have the whole world to yourself
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