Mitre & Mondays taught me to look out and my life is better for it
Disclaimer: I was technically paid to write this, but all opinions (even the one where I think I’m ‘noticing’ wrong) are embarrassingly my own. I was not rewarded or remunerated additionally for writing favourably about my team/friends.
Like all great stories, it began on the London Underground. Either emerging from or descending into the depths of Angel Station, I told Finn I’d never realised how long or high the escalator was here (apparently the station has the longest escalators on the Underground network, and the fourth-longest in Western Europe!) and he replied, “Cat, you’ve got to look up! You’re a designer now!”
I sat with this for a while. I’m a writer. I have always been a writer. I’m terrible at drawing and up until very recently, I found art galleries truly challenging to spend time in. (Something about the clinical whiteness and the passive aggressive little arrows telling me where to go). Since working more in the design world – a strange, wonderful, familial space – I’ve tuned into noticing things more. And since working with Finn, Joe and Freya, this has slowly become a more instinctive reaction to the world around me.
It did not come naturally to me. To be active in noticing is different to simply being aware that you are moving through a series of formations, structures and spaces. To notice is to engage with what is placed around you; to look beyond your blinkers; to both wander and wonder with your eyes; to truly take it in. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to examine everything you notice (this is difficult for someone with such an obsessive tendency to over analyse). At first, this is what I thought I was meant to do (although I admit that part of the problem was that I thought there was a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to notice things).
I would walk past a particularly intriguing detail on a house and I felt that I should fold my arms and look upon it as if I were in a gallery. My brain would be firing synapses, trying to place the connection. It was as if I was constantly interrogating why I liked something, as opposed to just accepting that I liked it. I was placing more emphasis on the cerebral and less on the tactile.
The thing that I began to realise – or rather tried to deconstruct – is that looking out and noticing things is not about logic or trying to ‘understand’ things. Sort of like how when someone tells you that meditation isn’t about not thinking, but about allowing thoughts to simply pass.
Instead, the material connection that we talk about at Mitre & Mondays is less immediately about connecting a tangible, physical thing to an ideology; but instead simply conjoining or deconstructing two physical parts. At some point, this might light a fire in our minds about a certain notion, but that’s not the point of noticing. It’s just recognising the interestingness, or the randomness, or the physicality of objects, spaces and things.
My camera roll is suddenly full of random pictures. Two wooden formations in front of an old building in Copenhagen that appear both accidental and deliberate at the same time. Wonky photos of the curve and colour of West London drainpipes and tube railings on the Piccadilly Line. Many images of rocks, which feature heavily in Mitre & Mondays’ spaces and products. In fact it was the rock in their Heavy Light, the way Finn and Joe explained playing with weight, balance and precarity, that made me want to work with them. I’m still not sure exactly what these forms and structures mean in the context of design – I don’t have any expertise in applying them into a drawing or an object, but I find a childlike sense of thrill at noticing these mirrored images and reporting back to the team, or randomly sending photos of my discoveries on our group chat.
Now I notice how others notice things. At lunch Finn will point out an accidental curve on a wooden panel; while Freya and Joe will discuss how a metal bannister has been welded. They all like to touch things (I’ve caught this on camera many times). I have always been fascinated by tactility, but that is something I usually enjoy in the privacy of my own home. I had never even really considered public texture as something I could access. Why? I don’t know. It’s a process of unlearning and unravelling. I watch them quietly, noticing how they notice, learning to look out for myself.
It is in looking out and up that I’ve stopped simply gazing at the floor or obsessively assessing my emotional environment. Instead I’m finding that the world is full of infinite, endless material possibilities, if only we cared to notice.