by Alex Monroe
It’s the bird that gives the first piece that wonderful sense of movement. I take three little swallows from my bits-and-bobs box, introduce them to my crescent composition and the piece immediately comes to life.
Again, I cast plaster over the plasticine and silver, and again, I have an agonising wait.
The next day I peel off the plasticine, syringe on the solder, give it a blast with the torch and hear the hiss in the water. Feeling like an archaeologist, I gently brush away the remaining plaster, hoping to find something worthwhile beneath. And there it is, a design about the size of a smile, and with the feeling of a smile too. It’s a festive burst of floral. Much more Italian than Pakistani, I realise.
This collection is going to be called Calabria.
The Gardener
It’s September 2009 and I’m setting up at London Fashion Week again. We are transporting everything we need to recreate a little world in miniature. An allotment in silver and gold. I know it’s charming. I know it’s worked before. But still I take a deep breath, fortify myself with the scent of moss and peat and seedlings and stones, and prepare for battle.
We arrive at Somerset House to find ourselves unceremoniously allocated a stand in a disused office block nearby. It’s not a long walk but you do have to cross some busy roads and I’m carrying a stack of heavy wooden trays. My humour doesn’t improve when I see the building. The square-panelled suspended ceiling is broken in places, and hanging cables and ducting spew out of the gaping holes. The walls are grubby. Fluorescent strip lights flicker. I have a look at the stand itself. It’s the usual shell scheme design, an aluminium-framed structure with white infill panels, about a metre deep and four metres wide. For the second time in ten minutes, I trip over an odd 30cm return on one of the sidewalls. I ask a workman to remove it.
Stay calm, Alex. Try and be constructive.
There’s no time to grumble. The show opens in two days and we need to get everything set up. Emma, Suzy and I crack on with the task in hand: to recreate a magical little world I’ve invented to display the new collection of jewellery called The Gardener. This is a collection that has evolved in a topsy-turvy sort of a way. It was my way out of a paradox.
Every season, after every show, just as I’m finally settling into relief that a collection has been well received – it’s a success, even! – I am brought up short by a curious feeling of nervous anticipation. It begins in the pit of my stomach. I don’t know why I don’t recognise it sooner. And then I remember. It’s not over, you fool. You can’t relax. You have to do this all over again in six months’ time. Even when you ignore the inter-season collections (which have ridiculous names like ‘Cruise’ and ‘Pre-Fall’), each set of shows comes round too quickly. And the more successful the last collection has proved, the more anxious I immediately start to feel about the next. Because next season my buyers will be wanting more of the same. Just so long as it’s completely different, of course.
Meanwhile, what ought to be an exciting whirlwind easily becomes quite overwhelming and oppressive. I also make exclusive collections for all kinds of important retailers around the world. Then there are the special events which need new and different designs too – an anniversary at Kew Gardens perhaps, or the opening of a new shop in Japan – not to mention special fund-raising pieces for charities, collaborative collections, trunk-show pieces and a mass of bespoke designs. One day I might learn to say ‘no’.
Expectations create claustrophobia. But at least I have plenty of ideas in the bank. I’ve always got my sketchbooks. Eight tatty back-broken old A4 volumes in a bookcase in my Elephant and Castle studio office, shelved among rows of lever-arch files labelled Orders on or Suppliers. Some of these sketchbooks are neatly numbered, some carelessly labelled, some go right back to my art-school days. All are crammed full to bursting with oddments of paper, photographs and bits of plants. When I pull one from the shelf, dry leaves and torn-off scraps tumble from it onto the floor, and I have to go down on my knees to gather them up again. The books are like a visual diary for me. I flick through the years as I leaf through their pages, in search of a passing thought that can be reharnessed, an image I half-remember. An idea that once got away.
The only untitled sketchbook opens in landscape, and there’s a stained and ragged page ripped from a notebook stuck on the front. That was the year I spent making fantastical sundials for people’s gardens. An exquisite little booklet falls out. It’s hand-stitched with an azure-blue loose cover and a cream label printed by letterpress on rough card so you can feel the indents of each letter. The title is grand: A Guide to Sundials with special reference to Portable Dials and Navigation Instruments including the work of Alex Monroe 1990??–1992. Tissue interleaves the pages, some of which are also printed by letterpress and some photocopied from sheets typed on an old-fashioned typewriter. In contrast, the sketchbook itself is a jumble of scribbled notes and drawings, all looking most scientific but almost unintelligible to me now. There are drawings of planets with angles described and mathematical symbols liberally scattered around. Every few pages I spot a little sketch of a classical column or some Byzantine jewellery. Long paragraphs have been written over in harsh black biro, the word WRONG scribbled several times.
Tucked into the inside back cover of Yearbook 2000 is a wad of pressed tree leaves, mostly varieties of oak, all wrapped up in yellowing kitchen roll. I look at a carefully detailed, life-size sketch of an arum lily leaf – long spidery lines trace its veins – and some quick-fire studies showing the plant’s cream-soft conical white flowers. I came across that bed of lilies in the far corner of a friend’s garden in Kent. (I remember how sunny that June weekend turned out.) Elsewhere I see snowdrops in coloured pencil, pressed scarlet pimpernels, and notes on hydrangeas I’ve found in Greenwich Park and forget-me-nots on One Tree Hill. Finding another set of sketches labelled in Latin – Saxifraga x urbium – I remember how excited I was to discover London Pride in my own back garden, my pleasure in that pretty pink-freckled city fellow, full of frivolity and the indomitable spirit of the Blitz. I love its other common names too: Whimsey, Prattling Parnell, and my favourite, Look Up And Kiss Me. There’s the start of a collection of jewellery just in that name.
In many ways these drawings are forensic. I’m gathering information, clues as to how a thing works. Through drawing I can interpret and then reproduce the things I find. The other sketchbooks run chronologically. Sketchbook One starts when I was still at university, with a list of jobs to complete by 20 February 1985: Finish hammers. Stamps. Start raising large bowl . . . I made great big things back then – huge hand-raised bowls in patinated copper, formed by hammering great discs of metal for days on end. Having the tools and space and freedom made my ambitions large.
I’ll do that again one day, I think. And turn the page.
Among a long series of clumsy drawings of patterns and bowls, I find a string of little hanging bottles, old terracotta ones. I have no memory of seeing or drawing them, but I realise it’s the first sketch I’ve found that looks anything like jewellery. Then it all goes Celtic – a horse design deconstructed, some drinking vessels and a pattern of amusingly sad-looking fish. These I do remember. I drew them in the British Museum. New Range, it says triumphantly on the very last page of this book, above several drawings of a dead fish with a spear through it.
In Sketchbook Two I get into my stride. I’m a fully fledged jewellery designer now, and here are the pencil drawings to prove it. A year of cut fingers and frustration comes back to me with the sight of these designs for gold-foil-backed glass flower shapes with verdigris diving birds and carnelian beads. The attrition rate for these was high. I continue through pages of astrological designs to a mass of doodles of flowers and leaves, sketches from churches and hundreds of religious motifs and crosses. It’s all very messy.
Sketchbook Three opens in 1997 with a series of designs for an American clothing company (Fun, World Traveller, and Romantic Farm Girl) and by Book Four I’m on very
familiar territory. Little flowers on wreaths, and tiny insects. Pages and pages of butterfly wings, paisley swirls and leafy patterns and organic forms with scribbles and arrows and notes such as Slightly Victorian sentimental or Umbel structure – see sputnik. Pretty much wherever I have travelled and whatever I have done is recorded in a sketchbook somehow, even if it’s just been scrawled on the back of an envelope and stuffed inside.
Perhaps this territory is getting too familiar. When something is working well, and buyers are calling for more, the biggest temptation is to give them more of the same. It’s a problem for all designers after a while. It’s so easy to become complacent. You’ve developed your signature style, it’s going down a treat, and why would a leopard want to change his spots?
I remember a sign in the machine shop at art school: Familiarity breeds contempt.
If I don’t want to go stale, it’s time to scare myself. That should put life into the work. Starting work on The Gardener, I decide to have a go at something I feel really uncomfortable with. I’ll approach this new collection in a completely different way. Before the jewellery, I’ll create a story – an actual story – with a setting, a world of its own. A picture book. This will become an exhibition, and the jewellery will play its part.
My gardening obsession was seeded in the orchards of The Old Parsonage, among apples and apricots, pears and plums. Greengages were my favourites – there was something magical about their pale bloom, a powdery dullness, which you could polish away on your jumper, transforming the fruit into a shining gem. Sloes polished up well too, but they dried our mouths with sourness, and were best fed to a younger brother. Apples went on for months. The very first to crop was a small bright red fruit with a greasy skin, flesh stained pink, sweet as sugar, which fell from an unscalably tall tree quite early in August. The wasps liked them even more than I did. The very last to ripen was a russet we called Suffolk Spice. You could pick it right into November, up to Guy Fawkes Night. It was an easy climb to gather fruit with skin as matt as khaki emery paper, dry in the hand and rough on the tongue. It tasted of honey and cinnamon.
Each autumn the whole family turned out to pick apples to store in our cellars. We boys took great delight in scaring our sisters, who were waiting down below to catch the fruit we plucked. We shimmied along boughs as high and creaky as we could manage, always reaching for the fruit that seemed just out of our grasp. My father stretched out equally precariously from the top of a teetering stepladder. Then the seven of us turned into a production line, gently wrapping each apple in newspaper to stack in crates, while our hands turned black with newsprint. Well into the following spring, we’d still be eating the russets – soft-rough spongy bites of fermented spice.
Vegetables were a less communal affair. There was a greenhouse at The Old Parsonage but, like everything else, it was a wreck when we first arrived – the remains of a large structure with a steep roof pitched against a south-facing wall of high red brick. Behind the wall lurked a boiler-house. Cracked dry putty no longer did its job in the window frames, and every time the wind blew, more sheets of glass tumbled down and shattered. The peeling, rotten door was long off its hinges. Outside, the neglected vegetable beds and soft-fruit bushes had descended into jungle.
But in the spring of 1970 we got lucky. Reader’s Digest was looking for a location to shoot a piece about restoring a dilapidated Victorian greenhouse. They needed a beautiful wreck to bring back to life. Could we oblige? The photographer was Michael Boys, a friend of my parents. I have a copy of the Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual in which our greenhouse featured. Thicker than two phone books, it’s delightfully seventies in style, all browns and oranges with splashes of sombre greens. Stripped pine and white gloss; marigolds and ferns. It’s a Margo and Jerry kind of Good Life, rather than Barbara and Tom’s.
In the late 1960s, Michael had photographed English Style (Bodley Head, 1967), which remains one of my favourite reference books from that era. Terence Conran’s cottage in Suffolk, along with many of his neighbours’, illustrated the pared-down treatment of Victorian architecture that came into favour just then. It was a moment when nineteenth-century wrecks were the only affordable way many people could buy their own home. They were cold and drafty, with no central heating, and outside loos often enough. But they were also cheap and plentiful, and you could do what you liked with them. Designers like Conran offered inspiration for creative types who wanted to bring a bit of modernity into their new, old homes. Gone was all the clutter-clutter, carpets were chucked, floors and banisters were stripped, white paint was slapped straight onto unplastered brick walls. The odd piece of Victorian furniture was allowed alongside a modern minimalistic statement, in a confident mixture of below-stairs Victoriana and Twentieth-century Modern. People were hungry for manuals to show them how to achieve the New English look all by themselves. In 1972 the first DIY superstore opened in Britain: Texas Homecare.
How’s the plot?
I was talking to one of the least likely allotment holders I know: a superbly glamorous young designer friend called Lesley, who is also a fashion photographer. It was nearly closing time for the show at Paris Fashion Week, and I’d wandered over to her stand for a bit of gossip. We ignored Buba’s metallic-embroidered, fairy-tale handbags and discussed tomato blight instead.
Talking allotments and vegetable growing is a great antidote to all the showiness around us, though it’s hard to give a conversation full attention when you’re half-looking over each other’s shoulders for approaching press or buyers. My own plot – which I share with a couple of friends – is a quiet refuge from that very public world of exhibiting and selling, a place for introverted reflection as much as cultivating plants. I told Lesley about the struggles I’d been having with the soil – it’s tough getting a Suffolk-style tilth on London clay – and the fat, thieving squirrels, and also the record-breaking strawberry crop we’d had last year. She started telling me a touching tale about her daughter and a nice old chap they’d got to know at their allotment, and then our chat was cut short by a vibrating phone.
But something about Lesley’s story lingered in the back of my mind long after we’d packed up Paris.
I couldn’t remember the exact details, but that wasn’t the point. I began to write my own version of her tale. A little girl and her mother are scrumping from an overhanging tree when they meet an old man on his allotment. He invites them in, chucking over his keys so they can unlock the gate. They enter a hidden world of raised beds and potting sheds. Cane pyramids of beans and delicious fruit. It’s the beginning of a friendship, and soon the little girl and her mother are helping out regularly in the allotment. One day they visit the old man only to find he isn’t there. Later they see his shed being cleared out and discover he has died. But he has left them a special gift: the bunch of keys. Now it’s their turn to look after the allotment.
The story needed illustrating so I asked an old friend, Katharine Nicholls, to try a few watercolours. Swirling circles of greens, blues and browns in a dreamy summertime haze. Perfect.
I also needed a place where I could recreate the story’s setting. A potting shed full of plants and tools and tiny watering cans right in the centre of town. Penhaligon’s, the perfumiers, had just the right space at the back of their Covent Garden shop. A phone call to another old friend, Emily, and a plan was made and a date set. We could have the room from Friday 10 July for a couple of weeks. Friday would be press day. We used one of Kathy’s illustrations for the invitations and sent them out. There, it was done. No going back. I had two months to get this done. And I hadn’t even begun to design the jewellery.
But already I knew I wanted to display it in a living setting, silver and gold appearing magically among real growing plants, arranged on moss and twigs and grass. Back in my workshop at home I built a series of oversized seed trays out of old timber, salvaged long ago for just this sort of eventuality. I headed out to the countryside to forage. Tiny nettles and holly seedlings from Suffo
lk; mossy rocks and ferns from Wales. Hazel branches from the woods down near Pin Mill to cut into minute logs. I planted up my seed trays and scattered grass seed over the bare patches. Now they just needed to grow, and for the plants to spread and intertwine. This was going to take a great deal of care and patience.
Meanwhile, Kathy and I put the finishing touches to the book, and by that time the jewellery was almost designing itself. I drew sketches for a bunch of keys, plant labels, some rough garden string and a smooth apple. There was a bee buzzing by and a pea ready to pick. A tiny watering can with a drip just hanging from its spout. But time was running out and each piece still had to be made.
Thanks to Reader’s Digest, The Old Parsonage greenhouse was miraculously restored. A wide brick path running down its length was revealed, leading you from the half-glazed gloss-white wooden door, which now opened without a struggle. The dusty red brickwork still looked deliciously aged, but new slatted wooden workbenches now rose above a suitably Victorian fern bed. The place smelled of paint, putty and pine. And it felt big.
If we’d stoked up the still-working stove in the boiler-house on the other side of the wall, we could have grown almost anything in there. Pineapples or peaches – all kinds of exotic glories. But we stuck with the basics: tomatoes in the greenhouse, and salad in the cold frames that stood just outside. Out in the wide beds of the garden beyond grew all the standard veg: carrots, potatoes, courgettes and spinachey sorts of greens. There was no talk of heritage varieties in those days. This was simply food production. Growing to eat was as important to our survival as the chickens and ducks that roamed the orchards and tried to hide their eggs. When the garden went well, we ate lots. When it didn’t, we ate less.