17:42 / wind from east
Maghrib / shoreline
08 April / Cloudy
I’ve been thinking about maps as something you hold, not something you read.
Years ago, in Istanbul, I picked up an old biennale flyer—folded paper, blunt lines, grey water, roads like arteries. It wasn’t trying to be pretty. It was trying to be precise. And yet the creases, the worn corners, the way the ink sat on cheap stock made it intimate—like the city had been carried in someone’s pocket and slowly softened by the body.
That memory returned this week as I began sketching Portobello and Joppa.
I wanted the coastline to feel like a seam: a long edge where land and water negotiate with one another. I wanted the streets to sit like warp and weft—systems of movement, interruption, return. A faint grid underneath, not as control, but as quiet structure. An inset map, a reminder that a place is never alone; it belongs to a wider pull.
The map I’m making is not a claim to accuracy. It’s a way of noticing: where the wind turns, where the shore opens, where the town thins. A route from home to sea, drawn from memory. Weather as mark-making. A small archive beginning.
I don’t have my tweed samples with me yet—many of them are still in Chitral—but perhaps that’s the point. Before cloth, there is attention. Before embroidery, there is line. Before the object, there is the slow gathering of what insists on returning.
For now, I’m letting Portobello become a set of signals: shoreline, grid, road, drift. A cartography softened by hand.
What might become cloth:
A faint printed grid; a shoreline line held in grey; one chosen route stitched in gold—broken, returned, insisted upon.
“wind turned here”
“salt in the air”
“after prayer”
“stone holding rain”
“I walked without arriving”
“the sea kept its distance”