I've never been able to sketch well sitting still. Every real idea I've had for a piece has come to me while I was moving — walking somewhere with no particular purpose, half paying attention, catching a shape out of the corner of my eye that I then spend the rest of the walk trying not to forget. My actual sketchbook, if I'm honest, lives less on my desk than it does in my legs.
I noticed this most clearly on a trip a while back, walking home after a very late dinner through a street strung with lights I hadn't planned on stopping under. The scarf I'd brought was doing nothing against the cold, and I remember being more interested in the way the light was catching against the stone than in getting back to where I was staying. There's a particular kind of gold that only shows up at that hour, low and warm, and it's the same gold I spend an unreasonable number of hours in the studio trying to recreate in metal that doesn't move or change the way a street does. I didn't understand why that evening stuck with me until months later, looking at an early sketch and realizing the curve I'd drawn was almost exactly the curl of ironwork on a balcony I'd walked under and hadn't consciously looked at twice.
That's mostly how it goes for me now. I used to think inspiration was something you sat down and waited for, a discipline you practiced at a desk with a cup of coffee going cold next to you. I don't work that way, and I've stopped pretending I do. The pieces I'm proudest of almost never started at the bench. They started somewhere I wasn't trying to design anything at all — mid-conversation, mid-walk, once memorably mid-bike-ride down a street I wasn't even supposed to be on, having taken a wrong turn on a borrowed bicycle with a basket that kept clipping my knee.
That wrong turn, as it happens, gave me one of my favorite ideas of the year. I'd slowed at a corner to let a car pass, and the low sun was doing something to a row of shopfront awnings across the street — a soft, fluted curve repeating itself down the block, ordinary and completely unremarkable to anyone who wasn't looking for it. I wasn't looking for anything. I was just annoyed about being lost. But I found myself circling back an hour later just to look at it again properly, no bicycle this time, standing on the corner like someone waiting for a friend who wasn't coming, taking a photo I still have on my phone next to about forty near-identical ones.
I don't know how to explain this part of the process to people who ask what "inspires" a collection, because the honest answer sounds too small to be a real answer. It isn't a mood board. It's a scarf that wasn't warm enough, a wrong turn, a hem of afternoon light on a building I'll probably never see again. I've made my peace with not being able to plan for it. The studio is where a shape actually becomes a piece of jewelry — where the gold gets shaped and the stones get set and the twelfth prototype finally stops needing a thirteenth — but it's rarely where the shape starts. That happens outside, usually while I'm not paying attention on purpose, which might be the only part of this whole process I've never managed to get better at forcing.
— Arina
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