Imaginarium | A compendium of Inspiration

- SC

I concentrate on the experience of the journey, endeavour to connect with the way people live in different environments, to find exotic materials & explore how they are used, to observe craftsmen & ateliers, to discover colour combinations both man-made & natural, to open my senses to scents & soundscapes. Travel is a welcome creative interruption to daily life & the agenda becomes to observe, immerse, embrace & soak up all the details to file away in my IMAGINARIUM. I first imagine the spaces I work with based on my experiences & memories – the colours, scents & ideas I have gathered. I collect them like objects. They all become my life library, which I draw on for inspiration to dream up the interiors & products I design. This alchemy is part history, part reality, and whole lot of make-believe. IMAGINARIUM is a combination of my past & present, featuring photographs taken by me on my travels, as well as images of many of the interiors I have created over that same period, shot by some of my favourite photographers. Inspired by my love of history & of photographic film, Polaroids & pagination boards, IMAGINARIUM is a place where storytelling requires no words.

The colour palettes I love to work with unfold through the pages of this book. I have always been fascinated by watching a magazine come to life in a small format on the pagination wall: seeing the way the rhythm & threads of colour are revealed across the whole magazine before it is bound together & single pages are turned. I have applied that process to making IMAGINARIUM: considering the book as a whole while also breaking it down into individual spreads & pages. Pulling it apart, putting it back together, until the story was the one I wanted to tell. I grew up in a house surrounded by nature & beauty. Middle Harbour & all its wonders were a stone’s throw away; our garden was a magical place of colour & texture; our house was filled with textiles & art & books & treasures from faraway lands – even our everyday plates were souvenirs from Mum’s travels. My mother was a monumental force in my life. She not only encouraged every single craft class or workshop I dreamt of doing, but also showed me how to look at the world & see colour, sound, depth, vista, height, proportion & composition. She opened my eyes & my heart to the romance of travel. Mum was a textile collector, teacher & globetrotter, who revelled in colour, technique, travel, history, people, knowledge, traditional crafts & how they were passed down through generations. My father is a residential master builder; his deep appreciation of bricks sparked my curiosity about materials & finishes. (Dad’s favourite finish is satin nickel.) He taught me how to manipulate a space – how to see it without walls & then how to move those walls. Together, we would walk the streets of Sydney & New York, Dad pointing out the differences in the styles of brickwork that revealed their time in history & their origin according to colour, shape & texture, as well as how the master bricklayers had so artfully stacked them: English, Flemish, running, Dutch & the dental work! He taught me the language of building sites, which I love to this day – the smell of sand & wet cement is such a vivid scent from my childhood, triggering many memories. I have a long-standing love of libraries & books – all kinds of books.

 

I read voraciously but unfortunately do not have the memory for quotes & words – my mind needs the prompts & cues of notes & photographs, souvenirs & props. I have a vivid imagination & like to think that I have a librarian who lives in my head. The library of my imagination looks a little like the library on the top floor of the New York Yacht Club – it’s not grand with spiral staircases & witches’ walks, it’s more leather club chairs, well-loved Persian rugs, a carafe of water on a side table, labelled oak files to house the index cards with their typed Dewey Decimal classifications & tables piled high with books waiting to be sorted by an old librarian, who is hard of hearing and likes catnaps throughout the day. IMAGINARIUM is an actual place, as well as a place in my imagination. My design studio & shop are housed in a 300-metre square warehouse built in the early 1900s. Overflowing arched bookshelves tickle the ceiling alongside labelled & numbered drawers that were once shop-fitting pieces. Art lines the walls, desks are old dressmakers tables & a ceramic slop sink transported from the US sits below a hand-painted sign that captures my philosophy: ‘F*ck Everything Become a Pirate.’ My studio encapsulates the timeless essence of a Cabinet of Curiosities – encouraging you to pick up, admire, comment, marvel & wonder at the objects that brim & spill from the many drawers, shelves, boxes, compartments. A place of show & tell. I have followed a magical path throughout my twenty-five year career – I have always been freelance & felt the strength of that, like the wind in my hair – a freedom that lets me imagine what I want to do & to follow it.

 

My love of still-life in all art forms & interiors is the foundation to all I do. I invite you to use IMAGINARIUM to inspire your own projects or keep as a beautiful object that sits comfortably on your coffee table. Each day, a page can be turned to unfold new discoveries. Please feel free to lose yourself among its pages & let it spark your imagination for faraway lands & special places.

Watch the interview with Karen McCartney