What the Studio Is Working On Right Now
- Sinopia Decor
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Most creative process posts are written in retrospect. The material has been resolved, the object is finished, the form has itself declared and been named and photographed and listed. The story is told from the other side of the making—cleanly, with the benefit of knowing how it ended.
This is not that post.
This is a post written from the middle of things — from a studio where several ideas are simultaneously in progress, none of them finished, some of them not yet decided, one of them possibly going in the wrong direction entirely. It is the honest version of the making process, which is messier and more interesting than the retrospective one.
What is resolved and what is not
The Reshaping Collection currently has more finished pieces than it has ever had. Paper, fabric, yarn, cord, metal — each material has found at least one permanent form, and some have found several. Threshold, Soleil, Galets, Écorce, Luna, Trama, Horitzo, Espectre, Fissura, Ona, Embolcall, Jardí, the Marina pieces, the Ju Jus — the collection has grown from a single arch form in paper to a body of work that spans wall sculpture, vessel forms, textile installation, light fixtures, functional objects, and a permanent paper garden.
This is satisfying in the way that any accumulation of resolved work is satisfying. It is also slightly dangerous — because a collection that feels complete stops asking questions, and the Reshaping Collection is supposed to keep asking them.
Jardí and where it is going
Jardí — the paper garden sculpture with hand-painted wire-stemmed flowers planted in a mineral paper base — sold. And then something interesting happened.
The client who bought it came back. Not for another Jardí, but for more flowers — individual stems, the same forms, to arrange in a vase she had also bought from the studio. Eight stems, her own composition, her own vessel. The Jardí flowers had left their base and became something else in her hands.
This is the kind of signal the studio pays attention to. The individual stem — hand-cut crinkled paper, hand-painted, wire-stemmed, permanent — has a life independent of the garden base it was designed for. It can go in any vessel. It can be added to over time. It can be commissioned in a specific palette for a specific room. The flower form that began as a component of a larger sculpture has turned out to be a complete object in its own right.
Flors — the individual stem listing — is new. The making is not. The studio has been making these flowers for long enough that the hand knows exactly what it is doing, and quickly: twelve stems in two hours, each one hand-painted, each one different from the ones either side of it in the arrangement. The speed is deceptive. The result looks like it took much longer — which is the correct outcome for any handmade object.
New flower forms are being explored now. The original Jardí flowers — open, crinkled, painted at the edges — are one vocabulary. Other paper flower forms are possible, and some are currently in development: different petal structures, different scales, different materials, different relationships between the painted line and the white ground of the paper. What they will look like when they are finished is not yet decided. What they will be made from is somewhat clear.
The cord pieces and what they suggested
Working with cord — across Horitzo, the Ju Jus, the Marina coasters, the vase wrappings — taught the studio something about line and surface that is still being processed. Cord applied to a surface changes the surface completely. It adds relief, direction, and a tactile quality that paint or finish cannot replicate. It also adds time — cord work is slower than it looks, each line placed deliberately, the tension maintained consistently across the whole piece.
What cord suggested, and what is currently being explored, is the possibility of larger-scale cord work — pieces where the cord is not an accent applied to another surface but the primary material, the thing the object is entirely made of. The coasters and the vase wrappings use cord as a covering. The question being asked now is what cord does when it is the structure rather than the skin.
This is early. There are no finished pieces to show, no forms decided, no names assigned. There is a cone of cord and a set of questions and the particular feeling of a material that is willing to be something but has not yet said what.
The beads and wire
The beads and wire left the Reshaping Collection before the collection had a name. They travelled with the us as a making practice — a way for us to work with our hands during years of moving between countries, creating earrings, bracelets and necklaces for the pleasure of making rather than for any commercial intention. Over 100 pieces have sold through the studio since opening. Over 100 more are in the store now, each one of one, none of them repeated. The body of work grew quietly and consistently until it became too significant to remain a footnote in someone else's collection. The jewelry is becoming its own brand, with its own identity, its own website, its own creative direction. It was always going to. We were always making it — the studio just gave it a place to be seen for the first time.
What the studio is not working on
It is worth being honest about this too.
The studio is not working on everything at once. Making decisions, managing the store, writing this journal, running the design and architecture practice, and producing the Reshaping Collection simultaneously means that some threads are necessarily slower than others. The metal rod language — Espectre, Fissura, Ona, Sound of the Sea — is not currently being extended. It is complete enough for now, and extending it would require a clear reason to do so rather than simply a next piece to make.
The fabric pieces are in a similar position. Luna, Embolcall, the Marina tray, the door stops — fabric has said what it needed to say in its current forms. New fabric work will come when the material presents a new question. It has not done so yet.
This is the part of a material-led practice that is hardest to explain to people who expect a linear development — new collection, new pieces, regular drops at regular intervals. The Reshaping Collection does not work that way. It works the way the materials do: at its own pace, in response to what the material is asking, producing finished pieces when they are ready and not before.
The studio is a slow place. That is a design decision, not a constraint.
What comes next
The cord question will resolve itself when it resolves itself. The new flower forms are closer than the others — they are already being made, which is always the clearest sign that something is becoming.
The collection will keep growing. Not quickly, not on a schedule, not in response to a trend or a gap in the market. In response to the materials. In response to what the making process reveals about what is possible and what is not. In response to the particular satisfaction of a form that finally holds — the moment when an open question closes and something that did not exist before exists now, permanently, in the world.
That is what the studio is working toward. It always is.
The Reshaping Collection is available in the shop in Palamós and online. New pieces arrive when they are ready.
The Sinopia Journal publishes weekly — design thinking, process, and the occasional strong opinion about how a room should feel.
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