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mr.ian

@mrianworld

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Scent, memory and quiet ritual

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I've never really known how to separate myself from the things I make.

Mr Ian started with a name. Mine, rather unimaginatively.

But behind it are years of ideas, places I've been, people I've met, things I've kept and quite a few things I've had to let go of.

Some ideas have taken years to become anything. Others arrived in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday and wouldn't leave me alone.

I suppose that's what happens when you make something personal. It changes as you do.

I'm not entirely the same person I was when I started Mr Ian. Nor do I particularly want to be.

And I don't think Mr Ian is quite the same thing I imagined at the beginning either.

These five photographs feel like a little timeline of both of us.

Still figuring out what comes next. by @mrianworld

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2 days ago

I've been thinking about Christmas fragrances.

Which is slightly ridiculous when it's October and Brisbane is already getting warm.

While I was away for Veuve Clicquot's Le Picnic, I found myself thinking about the smell of a long lunch. Champagne, grass, warm air, the sort of afternoon where nobody is particularly interested in looking at the time.

Then I started thinking about Christmas.

I've spent the last two Christmases by the sea. No snow, no roaring fireplaces, no cinnamon-covered everything.

Just salt on your skin, sunscreen, open windows, cold drinks and the peculiar feeling of not knowing what day it is.

So I've been back at the fragrance table, playing with a few ideas.

The scent of a field. The long lunch. Christmas by the sea.

I'm rather taken with the last one.

Although I suspect I'll end up making all three. by @mrianworld

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3 days ago

I've always been more interested in what a fragrance reminds someone of than whether they can identify what's in it.

A person. A particular summer. Someone's shirt. A hotel room you haven't thought about in years.

You can spend months getting a fragrance right, deciding what belongs in it and what doesn't. Then somebody wears it and it becomes part of a memory you know absolutely nothing about.

I rather like that.

ARTOS. YOU. SOMETHING.

Three fragrances, three very different personalities. by @mrianworld

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4 days ago

I've returned. I have 47 things to do, three new ideas and absolutely no recollection of my passwords. by @mrianworld

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6 days ago

THE THINGS WE CARRY.

It started as a box.

Something to carry with me. Something that would appear in every place, slowly collecting evidence that we’d been there.

A boarding pass. A sticker. Something found. Something given. Something I probably should have thrown away but didn’t.

By the end, it had become a sort of travel diary.

I’ve always liked objects that show where they’ve been. The suitcase with an old luggage tag. A receipt left inside a book. A hotel key you discover six months later in the pocket of a jacket.

We tend to think souvenirs are the things we buy.

Sometimes they’re just the things we don’t throw away.

In Transit. by @mrianworld

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10 days ago

IN TRANSIT.

I’ve always found it difficult to explain where ideas come from.

Travel. Hotels. Food. People. Design. Fragrance. All true, but none of it quite explains it.

I think I’m most inspired when I’m moving between them.

A menu I keep. Someone’s shoes on a train. The music playing in a bar. An old shopfront. A hotel lobby. A conversation with someone I’ll probably never see again.
Things I notice without knowing why I’m noticing them.

So I went looking.

In Transit is a study of place, creativity, and the things at the heart of a city that make it feel like nowhere else.

I’m home now.

The green box came back with a few more stories on it. So did I. by @mrianworld

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11 days ago

Emotional Support Candles

I used to light candles because I liked the scent.
Now I light them with purpose.

These four candles were designed during one of the more painful periods of my life, after losing my mum. I didn’t set out to make a collection about grief. If anything, I was probably looking for somewhere else to put it.

I became interested in untranslatable words. Words that held feelings, places and moments that English seemed to need a paragraph for.

Metanoia. Samah. Fernweh. Ruinenlust.

Change. An evening with music and poetry. A longing for somewhere far away.
The strange beauty we find in ruins.

Each became a fragrance.

There is something about lighting a candle that feels different to spraying perfume. You strike a match. You wait for the flame to settle. You leave it burning beside you while you read, cook, listen to music, have someone over, or sit alone with whatever has followed you home that day.

I used to light candles because I liked the scent.

Now I light them when I want to remember something. Sometimes when I want to let something go. Sometimes simply because the house feels too quiet.

Perhaps that is why I started calling them my Emotional Support Candles.

It sounds slightly ridiculous.
They’ve also earned the name. by @mrianworld

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12 days ago

OUT OF OFFICE.

See you 11 October.

Try not to need me.

Ian x by @mrianworld

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24 days ago

UNCHOSEN

There is a particular pain in not being chosen.

It can be someone you've known for years, or apparently someone you've known for four minutes. The nervous system isn't always terribly interested in the distinction.

Someone decides you're not for them and suddenly you're conducting an internal audit. Was I too much? Too quiet? Too interested? Not interested enough? Was it something I said? My body? My age? The fact I keep Le Labo hand wash in the guest bathroom?

The strange thing about rejection is how quickly another person's decision becomes evidence about ourselves.

I've spent an extraordinary amount of time wondering why certain people didn't choose me, and considerably less time wondering why I was so determined to be chosen by them.

That's a slightly less comfortable question.

Sometimes two people meet and one of them simply doesn't want to continue. No villain. No great psychological diagnosis. No forensic examination of a Tuesday-night conversation required.

It still hurts.

At 45, I don't think I've reached some enlightened point where rejection doesn't sting. I am, however, getting a little better at noticing when someone else's no starts becoming my opinion of myself.

I called a fragrance Unchosen this week.

I'm beginning to think it has very little to do with perfume. by @mrianworld

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25 days ago

I’m quite bad at throwing things away.

Not everything. Receipts, instruction manuals and the mysterious collection of charging cables we all seem to own can go.

But objects with a story tend to stay.

An old book. A hotel key. Something bought in a city I haven’t been back to. A box that has somehow followed me through several houses despite having very little practical purpose.

Their value rarely has much to do with what they cost.

They’re just small bits of evidence.

I was there.
I knew that person.
That mattered to me once.

Perhaps that’s what treasure actually is. by @mrianworld

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a month ago

I like this part.

Before something has a name. Before the label is straight. Before anyone has decided how it should be photographed, described or sold.

Paper everywhere. Bottles open. Things being moved around because they don’t quite feel right yet.

Most of what I make spends quite a long time in this state.

I used to think the aim was to get through this bit quickly. To arrive at the finished thing.

These days I’m less certain.

There’s something rather nice about an idea while it still has the freedom to become something else. by @mrianworld

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a month ago

I grew up with Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Turn to page 42 if you take the path through the forest. Page 67 if you go back. Make the wrong decision and, usually, there was still a finger quietly holding your place on the previous page.

Life has proved less accommodating.

There are no fingers holding pages. No flicking backwards because you’ve decided you preferred the other ending. Mostly you choose something, live with it for a while, then wonder what was on page 67.

I still have a few of these books from the 80s.

Perhaps that’s why I kept them.

Not for the adventures.

For the completely unreasonable idea that there was always another choice. by @mrianworld

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a month ago