This collection took most of a year, and it started by accident. I went to Bát Tràng to look around and came home thinking about jewellery. The rest of the year went into working out what each place was actually good at.
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| 【FIG 01.】Huey x Lulu and Georgia |
Gom Su (Ceramics) ~ Bat Trang
Ceramic was the first thing I tried. What Bát Tràng taught me is that you cannot control the colour. The kiln decides, and pieces from the same batch come out looking different from each other. At first that seemed like a problem. Then I stood in front of the racks and realised the differences were the best thing there. So for these pieces I picked one glaze and gave it room, instead of forcing everything to match. A piece at the wrist is small. The surface has to do the work.
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Voan Lua (Silk & Veil) ~ Van Phuc
Silk was harder, because you cannot judge it from a photo. It has to be held. It has weight, it hangs a certain way, and it will fray at a wrist long before it shows wear anywhere else. At Vạn Phúc I watched the cloth move across the loom, and how much a sheer panel changes when there is light behind it. That is where the veil came from: a light layer set against metal, so the piece moves when you do.
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May Tre (Rattan) ~ Phu Vinh
Rattan taught me to stop drawing straight lines. I went in with neat, square ideas. In Phú Vinh I learned that a strip of rattan remembers what you do to it: bend it too far and it will not go back to the shape you wanted. There were offcuts on the floor curled into spirals, and that shape was better than anything I had drawn. The pieces follow it now, which means they hold themselves instead of being forced into place.
Đo Đong (Bronze) ~ Hang Dong
The one thing I that you never know whats gonna happen
Bronze came last and it was the noisiest. On Hang Dong you hear the hammering from the street. I liked the tool marks, the unfinished edges, the parts you would normally polish away. Bronze also changes with wear, so I left those pieces open on purpose. They will look different in a year than they do in the shop.
None of this came from me alone. Until this collection I had designed everything myself, so handing my drawings to people who had never seen my work, and who had no reason to be polite, took some getting used to. They corrected things I had not thought about: a glaze that would not hold at a small scale, a fastening that would fray before the season ended, a shape that would not survive being made. All of it was right. I stopped arriving with the answer and started arriving with a question, and the collection is better for it.
So the collection belongs to those workshops as much as it does to me.
The Hanoi Experience is ceramic, silk, rattan and bronze, made by hand in the villages they come from.
Binh xx
