The Terpsichoria

For Abigail Stewart's FW2014 collection. I'm not very good at putting my photographs' infrastructure into words so here is Abigail's musing about the base of the shoot

"The real name of FW2014 is "The Terpsichoria," a reference to a ship, but everyone on the team just calls it "The Scar." The Scar is the title of Miéville's 2003 masterpiece of fiction, a book that blew my face off the first time through. It is a bizarre, metaphysical mystery set on a floating pirate city, on an Earth-like planet, where whole civilizations exist underwater and diplomacy is carried out via submarine between human beings and formidable rock lobster centaurs who tattoo their tails with military decorations and tribal histories. The creatures in this book are terrifying, the plot even more so; and China, like Kafka, is obsessed with architecture, so the descriptive sketches of the marine worlds were enough to inspire years of work in themselves. I just needed one scene, for one collection. Each piece, I thought, could be part of the setting: fish bones, mussel shells, numbing metallic saltwater."


model is ella pearson
hair and makeup by caroline baribeau
tattoo art by katy farmer
assistants were jess olm and jordan holberg

diary 27 (september 14)

Started the month camping on a private island in upstate new york- didn't see anyone at all for days. Spent days and days on end in the city purposefully wasting time in parks or shops or on my roof or at small art show things. Lost a lot of my quiet habits and it didn't end up making me feel better like I thought it would. Flew to Oregon and road tripped through Washington for the last two weeks of it- stole camp sites in Olympic national park and the Hoh rainforest. Being in an unfamiliar-surrounding mindset nonstop is where I thrive though I've never felt this at ease within it which is maybe better i can't tell. I keep having very haunting dreams.

diary 26 (august 14)

 The first week of August I was in Canada, woke up early and drank coffee in the garden for hours, Toronto's streets aren't numbered but I knew where I was going- North, South, East, West. Wrote my answer to the question 'what would you tell to a past you?' as 'don't be so dependent on being independent' sitting in the same living room that years ago in I needed it the most. In Montreal the hours melted away and I didn't pay attention to where I was or where I was going, and didn't have to, nothing was written in english anyway. Kept having dreams vaguely about the girls that I was staying with and they were of me too. The overnight buses that I took from place to place were the same as always- nothing for hours and hours but I know I book them on purpose. My home is very familiar and lonely- it really does feel like home to me fully now. Read books for most hours of the day/night. Watched one dawn as the streetlights clicked off down the street one by one, every minute. Covered the horizontal surfaces of my bedroom in mirrors and rectangles of glass.