Chromatic
Colour, line, and my creative practice that won't stay in lane
It’s so easy to forget that cups need to be refilled, creative ideas replenished and ‘output’ needs to pause occasionally in order for the above to take place.
This weekend is a bank holiday weekend in the UK, meaning that those with salaried jobs get an extra paid day off on Monday. That used to be me. In fact, this time last year it would have been half term, and I was in France for a week celebrating my 40th birthday.
2026 is different. I’m now 100% self employed, running Hannah Ashe Interior Design. It feels really good to say that and there is zero part of me that wants to go back to any form of teaching right now, but that’s not to say it’s all roses.
A bank holiday means a three-day weekend for my husband who has a salaried job and since the weather is stunningly good, it feels right to also take a three-day weekend myself. Make hay while the sun shines and all that.
And anything that makes me stop for three days is definitely a good thing because since full time self-employment has been my thing, I find it hard to stop working. I really love working on my business, but pausing is challenging and I find it particularly difficult to make time for writing.
It’s now Sunday morning, 8:30am. I’m sitting in my garden in my pants and a T-shirt. No bra. Sorry to any neighbours that might have opened their curtains, but I honestly don’t care. I’m about to turn 41 (next Saturday) and zero fucks are given these days.
The birds are singing, the magpies are going crazy (the less relaxing end of the birdsong spectrum) and there are bees frenzied with decisions about which flower to visit next because my garden is a little haven for them right now.
I was reading Julia Cameron’s memoir Floor Sample in bed, but it was getting warm and I wanted a cup of tea and, as happens when I read Julia Cameron, I was overcome with an urge to sit outside in my pants and write. So here I am.
Yesterday, we visited the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden. It’s a piece of woodland that has been transformed over the past 40 years by its owners. We’d visited once before in April 2022.
One of the first things that struck me as we started exploring the garden on this return visit was that last time I came here, I hadn’t started writing.
I couldn’t shift that thought from my mind the whole time. It felt like I would see and feel the place differently because I knew I would need to write about this experience, and I knew that it would influence my artistic practices both in terms of my work and my creative hobbies.
Reading Julia Cameron’s memoir has grounded my understanding of creative practice - of not needing to be defined in one artistic medium and going with the flow. It’s how I feel about much of my work but have often felt like I flit from one thing to another - music, design, writing, drawing - but Julia has reminded me that I can do all of these and I should do all of these.
One artistic practice will feed into another and we sometimes have periods of our life where one is presenting more strongly than another, but that’s not to say we can’t keep shifting and returning to old forms which fit like a glove.
I started my creative life as a musician. I trained as a composer and was always drawn to multi-disciplinary work even back then. While at music college I worked with dancers, choreographers, actors, graphic designers, artists and sculptors. With each project, I thrived on the energy that was exchanged in this collaborative effort, and it would often prompt me to branch out in further creative ways from the music.
One musical composition, commissioned for Kettle’s Yard a few years after graduating - Contortions for two cellos and a dancer - started life as a series of sketches. I began with the visual element for each movement and the music flowed from there.
Another time, when writing Chromaticity, I worked with a graphic artist who interpreted my music for a 12-piece saxophone ensemble into a visual sequence. I haven’t watched this for many years until today and I was struck by the sense of ‘line’ throughout the piece:
Line in music often means melody, but line can also extend to become counterpoint when the layers of melody interweave. Line is arguably the cornerstone of my interior design work with most projects beginning life as lines on a plan and invisible lines of flow through a space being central to a layout. The rhythm of that line becomes vital as it does in music.
Colour too, is a central theme of my work. The musical composition above is called Chromaticity meaning “an objective, mathematical description of a colour's quality, independent of its brightness or luminance”. I remember at the time of performance, the conductor accidentally referring to the piece as ‘Chromatic City’ and I also like this name because the music has a sense of colourful busy-ness to it - with a moment of expressive light emerging halfway through.
Like a person spending years following the crowd and then suddenly realising their voice is important and wanting to gently, but insistently share what they have to say before rejoining the throng, irrevocably changed. Is that a metaphor for me?
Chromaticism in music refers to the 12-tones of the chromatic scale, alluding to a sense of colour spectrum in sound (chroma = colour). Colour in interior design is a vital element and I can’t explain to you how I know certain colours work together. I just feel it.
So what did the sculpture garden have to do with any of this?
During the three hours we spent there, I realised that my creative senses were awakened. Colour was a key to some of the sculptures, ensuring that as you rounded a corner or caught a glimpse from a new angle, colour was the first thing you saw:
Others tricked my eyes and morphed into trees as I approached and the light hit differently.
Setting and nature were vital to each piece and we noted how the sculptures would look and feel different at various times of the year. In May, foliage is at its most luscious and vibrant but that meant that some artworks were almost swallowed by the rampant greenery, whereas in winter, the materials would present completely differently.
This is what I want my art to be - alive, constantly changing and evolving, and responding directly to situation and circumstance. What I write depends on where I am physically, mentally and geographically. What I design is inherently related to the given brief, but it will always be a response to what I’ve been seeing and experiencing and what I know to be true and feel right in that moment.
Musical creation isn’t active right now, but it will call me again when the time is right and I will be ready for it.
I’m Hannah. I’m 40, childfree and live in London. I left teaching behind to pursue a more creative approach to work. I earn my living from interior design consultancy, writing and creating works I’m passionate about.
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Yes going bra-less is part of my repertoire too. We don't have neighbours, only cows who don't give a f...! 😆 That sculpture garden is stunning. It's like a labyrinth 😍
That sculpture garden is really something!