The garden between the studio and the church vicarage. Portrait FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Kristin Perers, Katie Smyth, Terri Chandler
My home is located in a 19th-century vicarage; my husband is the vicar of St. Thomas Church, a Church of England church from that era in London’s East End. It was built to the elegant proportions of Georgian London architecture—five stories tall, thin and airy—on a terrace that is one of the oldest in this part of the city.
The house is home to my husband and me and sometimes our three (mostly) grown children. The house also plays a double act: linked directly to the church by way of the crypt, vestry and tower, it is a public space hosting a variety of gatherings for the church and community.
WORM ladies Katie Smyth (LEFT) and Terri Chandler (RIGHT) ON the church roof
When my husband was looking for solutions to bring life to the large and barren church hall, I thought instantly of WORM. I had collaborated with the florist duo WORM, photographing, amongst other projects, their bestselling book Wreaths, and I knew they had outgrown their current studio circumstances.
I also had a hunch that this creative duo would bring more to the church hall than just regular rent; they would bring an infectious energy, and with their Irish Catholic background, a certain simpatico conversation that would add layers to the dialogue of this multicultural community.
This is part of the challenge of maturity — to corral all these creative interests together.
As a photographer I create images. As a wife and mother I create something more elusive; a home, a life.
What blossomed is a creative collaboration between myself and WORM; a few words over tea…a morning stop-in as the bells rang in the tower above, marking the time of day. As the shared garden so visibly connected us to the seasons, we exchanged stories; the strong sense of history and particularity of the site affirming a strong sense of place. This challenged us in turn to ask questions around the spirituality that shaped our own practices.The site was no doubt sacred, it sang to us through the ritual that went on there and through the seasons. The communal garden is dug with parishioners’ ashes and a single apple tree, lasting perhaps from the ancient orchard. So if this land and the church felt ‘sacred’, what made it so? And how do we ‘take that home’ and make the sacred part of the everyday? And what would that look like?
I was born the middle of three children in Chicago. In 1968 our family moved to Florida, as my dad wanted to fulfill his dream of starting his own company (American Business Interiors is still going today, run by my brother, and just celebrated 50 years.) The freedom of a small town off the coast of Florida meant most of my childhood was spent outdoors, in a tree or in our rowboat on the Indian River.
My father is Swedish; our link with our ancestry informed family rituals and, even today, my interior aesthetic. I grew up as an Episcopalian in Florida and then lost touch with my Christian roots when I moved to New York. I only reconnected with this rich tradition, albeit in a new way, when I married my husband and became the vicar’s wife.
My passion for creating has always been there. In small town America in the 1970’s there was not much in the way of entertainment or even material goods. Making and crafting were a way to pass the time; a form of self-expression as well as necessity.
What I am doing now is combining the skills I have picked up in different stages of my life. I studied fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC and worked as a designer for many years, going on to become a stylist and then a photographer. Painting and drawing have always been an undercurrent of all of this.
Kristin Perers Wise Words
“There’s a time for everything in your life, but not for everything all the time.”
— My Mom, because she was a painter and an artist, and understood the creative yearning and heartache caused by the struggle between motherhood, marriage and a creative life ‘that calls you like a lover.’
Hand painting fabrics inspired by flowers in Kristen Perers’ studio collaborating with WORM London
At 57, my task now seems to be to corral all of this, and to bring it home into one unified endeavor, although that remains an ever-elusive task! My photography, painting, and textile work all are passions that I learned and skills I honed in different stages of my life. Being a vicar’s wife, I am beginning to see my creative role in a larger landscape of creating for our common life together.
The emotional influence of color is an underlying strand in my work as a photographer and painter. Perhaps this fascination is exaggerated by my experience of having lived in the extremes of color; a childhood in the bright vibrant hues of Florida, and my adult life first in NYC and then London, learning to admire the subtle shades of grey. I have a lineup of small glass jars, almost like a chemistry lab of color, collected in the Southwest of America; dirt and sand of the most breathtaking hues. It was collected upon my leaving America and emigrating to Europe—I wanted to take a bit of home with me.
My personal creative process is very intuitive and that’s why I like working with Katie and Terri; they are able to just completely jump into big, open, imaginary thinking. For instance, on our Garden Museum exhibition, we just sat and talked, writing down key words, then considered a few images that were more like thumbnails or place holders. I firmly believe in not using images too much at this stage—as you can get stuck with images and not go past them.
Words leave more room for the imagination at the beginning of projects. And you have to risk being foolish—to say the crazy thing and to work off-piste. The collaboration I did with WORM for the British brand Toast on the theme of “Pioneer” highlighted this, and challenged us to explore uncharted territories and be willing to go our own lonely way.
For all our collaborative projects, it is the colour story that really pulls it all together, so we definitely start with colors. I was really led by what Katie and Terri wanted to do—they wanted to work with dried flowers—the colors are quite burnt out and subtle, almost washed-looking.
We were trying to evoke the feeling of an Irish seaside garden. The colors were essentially derived from this concept, and I went to work creating fabrics to match this idea.
I’ve become very interested in natural dyeing as a sideline, and I’ve hosted dyer Kathryn Davey many times for workshops at the Flower Factory Studio. So the fabrics I create are more an extension of my painting, a combination of natural dyeing techniques and painting. I call them dip-dyed and hand-painted textiles.
So before our May altar project, we would have a meeting in the WORM studios, and then I would run home thirty metres up to the vicarage where I’ve built my studios. I have a rooftop terrace where I like to do my messy work like painting and dyeing; it is up in the trees on the roof of the church. I hang my fabrics on a string drying line and they dry in the sun and wind. This lends that unique tonal faded look to the fabrics, which I love.
Garden Museum May Flower collaboration
Our creative collaborations have bubbled over into the wider community, which is an area outside of the gentrified parts of Hackney. Our community is a real collision of culture, as our congregation is mostly African and Caribbean; there is an important Hasidic Jew community and also a strong Muslim community. Within a few months of moving here, Katie and Terri had gotten to know everyone in the neighbourhood—there was this incredible sense of outreach.
Another project that is very close to our hearts is the Haberdashery exhibition, inside a wonderful local Hackney community cafe. We go in there all the time to have a morning coffee, and the owner asked us whether we would consider exhibiting our work.
That exhibition was sparked off by a trip I did to Scotland with my husband. When I travel, I paint color swatches of the landscape, and I was very much inspired by my Scottish trip. At the same time, my husband was reading a book about ecology and the climate crisis and this idea that we are going to lose all the colors in our landscape as it becomes more burnt out. All those rich mossy greens and dark brackens will simply disappear.
I love creative collaborations and how they can take you to a new space that you may never have gone on your own. Alongside this, the church community and the buildings themselves have held our collaboration by providing both a physical space to explore our shared interest in the seasons, as well as a spiritual space where we are able to ask the bigger questions of our own place in the created order. As we face the catastrophe of climate change, this level of engagement seems particularly urgent.
Our exhibition was about looking at the landscape, and what we’re risking losing, and to make that connection. We take color so much for granted, but all the incredible color in the world is a gift.
I think my biggest accomplishment has been to look back and realize I have made a living, a life, as a freelance creative. I have morphed when the time came from being a fashion designer to a stylist to a photographer—and kept a roof over my children’s heads. I have ridden the wave of life; sometimes the crest, at times the depths, but I’m still surfing. I haven’t stayed safely on the beach and watched, although now I could use a little of that!
And the wonderful title of this magazine, What Women Create—well of course that has a multitude of answers; we create life, not just by giving birth to children, but as holders of ritual by passing down emotional knowledge. We are communicators to the next generation, even if we don’t use words but just actions. I have found myself in a place, a life I never dreamed of, and sometimes I feel like Dorothy, forever seeking home. This space, this place has called us—and my collaborations with WORM and the wider community—to make this home…while we are here.
Art is about the spirit, it touches into our faith, whatever that may be. Art can take you to a place, and take others to a place, that is beyond the everyday. It can touch parts of us that take us out of the ‘seen’ world to a place of mystery and grace.
We are, in our own way, yearning for meaning in our life, yearning to feel good about ourselves when we step outside the door. We question how we spend our money and want to live a life of integrity, and it becomes really hard when you get so many messages about how everything we do is a pollution. It feels so good to know that really our actions have a chain reaction in doing good in this world.
Terri Chandler and Katie Smyth started WORM in 2016 after years of feeling like they were not on the right career path (Terri was an actress and Katie a stylist.) They started WORM as a delivery service of a “Book and a bunch.” The idea was you would tell them all about someone you would like to gift, and they would choose a beautiful book for them by an independent publishing company and make a bunch of flowers with meaning to match. They would then wrap it beautifully and hand-deliver it to the recipient.
As time went on, they started to enjoy experimenting with flowers, which is what led them to where they are today, making big and small floral installations for a huge range of clients around the world.
Terri and Katie
We both live in East London, near our studio which is in Clapton. It’s a wonderfully creative area where there are lots of young startups all supporting each other. There is always something exciting going on somewhere. Our studio is at the bottom of the vicarage garden where Kristin and her husband, William, live. It was the church hall and we have rented a section of it from the church; it is a little creative haven. Kristin can just walk through her garden to reach us and passes through for a chat on her morning walk. We adore it!
We both grew up in the south of Ireland, Katie in the suburbs of Dublin and Terri on an island off of Cork. Both of our families always supported our creativity and never seemed to bat an eyelid at the many career changes we decided on along the way. Growing up in Ireland brings out a certain creativity in you that you don’t realise until you have taken yourself out of it. Ireland is saturated in it, through literature, storytelling, folklore and art. Everyone you meet can tell a good story in some way or another. I guess that’s what we do through our work with flowers (we are also big talkers!!)
We were both creative kids. Our earliest memories of being creative with flowers are the same. The May altar was such a huge thing growing up in Catholic Ireland. It’s a blue altar put up on the first of May in homes all across the land for Mary and her special month. You put a little statue of her up and surround her with flowers.
We both loved creating little vase arrangements to put on the altar every few days, making pretty. Recently for British Flowers Week, we collaborated with Kristin at London’s Garden Museum to create an installation based on this memory. We made the wild grassy coastal rock gardens of our childhood in the museum, and filled it with locally grown flowers with a little rock altar in the middle. Kristin made the most beautiful spirit flags that she hand-painted, which reminded us of running through the drying sheets in the garden to pick the precious flowers. It was so special for us to be able to recall these memories and bring them back to life in a beautiful collaboration.
Before WORM, we were both working in creative industries, but always at the hands of someone else. Making someone else’s vision was wonderful because it gave us so much experience and taught us to work hard. But as soon as we started our own thing and realised that all that hard work paid off directly to us, we knew we could never look back.
We decided to start the business in 2016 after we took a really introductory flower arranging course. It was one day a week for two months and we learned the very basics of flowers and how to work with them. We didn’t bother doing the second level of the course, and just made it up as we went along. We definitely took the long road, as most people go and have work experience to learn how their industry works; but we are glad now because we do it our way and that works for us.
Our favorite kind of work is collaborative, when there are no clients who might not get what you are trying to do. When we collaborate with Kristin, it is all about the seasons and a meeting of all three minds, which is wonderfully fulfilling.
We will sit in our studio together and drink tea, or in Kristin’s kitchen eating her amazing flaky pastry pie, and throw lots of ideas together until we have the start of something. There are always too many ideas; we have to whittle down to make something that makes sense to us all. Then we start creating and regrouping at different stages to show each other how far we have come. It’s always a really enjoyable experience.
Terri
We did what we set out to do. Very early, when we were coming up with ideas of what we could do as a company, we had one clear aspiration. As women in our early thirties, we were very aware that as we started to think about having families, we knew that the trajectory of our creative careers could be on the line.
You see it so often in creative industries—you go away for a while to have babies and you are at the bottom of the ladder when you come back, and struggle to get work. We wanted something that we could call our own, and something that gave us some autonomy over our creative lives. Today is the first day of my maternity leave before I go and have my first baby, and in six months’ time I can go back to being creative every day and being appreciated for it, and I am so proud of that fact.
Kristin
I am constantly inspired by the connection between creativity, the spirit and the domestic, and I enjoy Britain’s wealth of historic houses, museums and churches that spark my imagination on this. Right now I’m exploring how beauty in nature and art are touchstones for the divine, and how to make the unseen energy visible in our everyday lives.
WORM
We are inspired by so many places, and also by artists, gardens, music, and memories, but mainly for us it is the seasons. The seasons bring us the materials and most of the time that is enough. We are lucky enough to live in a part of the world that has very defined seasons, and all that rain in winter and spring brings the most wonderful payoff in summer, when colour just pops up everywhere and inspires so many projects for us.
The garden between the studio and the church vicarage. Portrait FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Kristin Perers, Katie Smyth, Terri Chandler
My home is located in a 19th-century vicarage; my husband is the vicar of St. Thomas Church, a Church of England church from that era in London’s East End. It was built to the elegant proportions of Georgian London architecture—five stories tall, thin and airy—on a terrace that is one of the oldest in this part of the city.
The house is home to my husband and me and sometimes our three (mostly) grown children. The house also plays a double act: linked directly to the church by way of the crypt, vestry and tower, it is a public space hosting a variety of gatherings for the church and community.
WORM ladies Katie Smyth (LEFT) and Terri Chandler (RIGHT) ON the church roof
When my husband was looking for solutions to bring life to the large and barren church hall, I thought instantly of WORM. I had collaborated with the florist duo WORM, photographing, amongst other projects, their bestselling book Wreaths, and I knew they had outgrown their current studio circumstances.
I also had a hunch that this creative duo would bring more to the church hall than just regular rent; they would bring an infectious energy, and with their Irish Catholic background, a certain simpatico conversation that would add layers to the dialogue of this multicultural community.
This is part of the challenge of maturity — to corral all these creative interests together.
As a photographer I create images. As a wife and mother I create something more elusive; a home, a life.
What blossomed is a creative collaboration between myself and WORM; a few words over tea…a morning stop-in as the bells rang in the tower above, marking the time of day. As the shared garden so visibly connected us to the seasons, we exchanged stories; the strong sense of history and particularity of the site affirming a strong sense of place. This challenged us in turn to ask questions around the spirituality that shaped our own practices.The site was no doubt sacred, it sang to us through the ritual that went on there and through the seasons. The communal garden is dug with parishioners’ ashes and a single apple tree, lasting perhaps from the ancient orchard. So if this land and the church felt ‘sacred’, what made it so? And how do we ‘take that home’ and make the sacred part of the everyday? And what would that look like?
I was born the middle of three children in Chicago. In 1968 our family moved to Florida, as my dad wanted to fulfill his dream of starting his own company (American Business Interiors is still going today, run by my brother, and just celebrated 50 years.) The freedom of a small town off the coast of Florida meant most of my childhood was spent outdoors, in a tree or in our rowboat on the Indian River.
My father is Swedish; our link with our ancestry informed family rituals and, even today, my interior aesthetic. I grew up as an Episcopalian in Florida and then lost touch with my Christian roots when I moved to New York. I only reconnected with this rich tradition, albeit in a new way, when I married my husband and became the vicar’s wife.
My passion for creating has always been there. In small town America in the 1970’s there was not much in the way of entertainment or even material goods. Making and crafting were a way to pass the time; a form of self-expression as well as necessity.
What I am doing now is combining the skills I have picked up in different stages of my life. I studied fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC and worked as a designer for many years, going on to become a stylist and then a photographer. Painting and drawing have always been an undercurrent of all of this.
Kristin Perers Wise Words
“There’s a time for everything in your life, but not for everything all the time.”
— My Mom, because she was a painter and an artist, and understood the creative yearning and heartache caused by the struggle between motherhood, marriage and a creative life ‘that calls you like a lover.’
Hand painting fabrics inspired by flowers in Kristen Perers’ studio collaborating with WORM London
At 57, my task now seems to be to corral all of this, and to bring it home into one unified endeavor, although that remains an ever-elusive task! My photography, painting, and textile work all are passions that I learned and skills I honed in different stages of my life. Being a vicar’s wife, I am beginning to see my creative role in a larger landscape of creating for our common life together.
The emotional influence of color is an underlying strand in my work as a photographer and painter. Perhaps this fascination is exaggerated by my experience of having lived in the extremes of color; a childhood in the bright vibrant hues of Florida, and my adult life first in NYC and then London, learning to admire the subtle shades of grey. I have a lineup of small glass jars, almost like a chemistry lab of color, collected in the Southwest of America; dirt and sand of the most breathtaking hues. It was collected upon my leaving America and emigrating to Europe—I wanted to take a bit of home with me.
My personal creative process is very intuitive and that’s why I like working with Katie and Terri; they are able to just completely jump into big, open, imaginary thinking. For instance, on our Garden Museum exhibition, we just sat and talked, writing down key words, then considered a few images that were more like thumbnails or place holders. I firmly believe in not using images too much at this stage—as you can get stuck with images and not go past them.
Words leave more room for the imagination at the beginning of projects. And you have to risk being foolish—to say the crazy thing and to work off-piste. The collaboration I did with WORM for the British brand Toast on the theme of “Pioneer” highlighted this, and challenged us to explore uncharted territories and be willing to go our own lonely way.
For all our collaborative projects, it is the colour story that really pulls it all together, so we definitely start with colors. I was really led by what Katie and Terri wanted to do—they wanted to work with dried flowers—the colors are quite burnt out and subtle, almost washed-looking.
We were trying to evoke the feeling of an Irish seaside garden. The colors were essentially derived from this concept, and I went to work creating fabrics to match this idea.
I’ve become very interested in natural dyeing as a sideline, and I’ve hosted dyer Kathryn Davey many times for workshops at the Flower Factory Studio. So the fabrics I create are more an extension of my painting, a combination of natural dyeing techniques and painting. I call them dip-dyed and hand-painted textiles.
So before our May altar project, we would have a meeting in the WORM studios, and then I would run home thirty metres up to the vicarage where I’ve built my studios. I have a rooftop terrace where I like to do my messy work like painting and dyeing; it is up in the trees on the roof of the church. I hang my fabrics on a string drying line and they dry in the sun and wind. This lends that unique tonal faded look to the fabrics, which I love.
Garden Museum May Flower collaboration
Our creative collaborations have bubbled over into the wider community, which is an area outside of the gentrified parts of Hackney. Our community is a real collision of culture, as our congregation is mostly African and Caribbean; there is an important Hasidic Jew community and also a strong Muslim community. Within a few months of moving here, Katie and Terri had gotten to know everyone in the neighbourhood—there was this incredible sense of outreach.
Another project that is very close to our hearts is the Haberdashery exhibition, inside a wonderful local Hackney community cafe. We go in there all the time to have a morning coffee, and the owner asked us whether we would consider exhibiting our work.
That exhibition was sparked off by a trip I did to Scotland with my husband. When I travel, I paint color swatches of the landscape, and I was very much inspired by my Scottish trip. At the same time, my husband was reading a book about ecology and the climate crisis and this idea that we are going to lose all the colors in our landscape as it becomes more burnt out. All those rich mossy greens and dark brackens will simply disappear.
I love creative collaborations and how they can take you to a new space that you may never have gone on your own. Alongside this, the church community and the buildings themselves have held our collaboration by providing both a physical space to explore our shared interest in the seasons, as well as a spiritual space where we are able to ask the bigger questions of our own place in the created order. As we face the catastrophe of climate change, this level of engagement seems particularly urgent.
Our exhibition was about looking at the landscape, and what we’re risking losing, and to make that connection. We take color so much for granted, but all the incredible color in the world is a gift.
I think my biggest accomplishment has been to look back and realize I have made a living, a life, as a freelance creative. I have morphed when the time came from being a fashion designer to a stylist to a photographer—and kept a roof over my children’s heads. I have ridden the wave of life; sometimes the crest, at times the depths, but I’m still surfing. I haven’t stayed safely on the beach and watched, although now I could use a little of that!
And the wonderful title of this magazine, What Women Create—well of course that has a multitude of answers; we create life, not just by giving birth to children, but as holders of ritual by passing down emotional knowledge. We are communicators to the next generation, even if we don’t use words but just actions. I have found myself in a place, a life I never dreamed of, and sometimes I feel like Dorothy, forever seeking home. This space, this place has called us—and my collaborations with WORM and the wider community—to make this home…while we are here.
Art is about the spirit, it touches into our faith, whatever that may be. Art can take you to a place, and take others to a place, that is beyond the everyday. It can touch parts of us that take us out of the ‘seen’ world to a place of mystery and grace.
We are, in our own way, yearning for meaning in our life, yearning to feel good about ourselves when we step outside the door. We question how we spend our money and want to live a life of integrity, and it becomes really hard when you get so many messages about how everything we do is a pollution. It feels so good to know that really our actions have a chain reaction in doing good in this world.
Terri Chandler and Katie Smyth started WORM in 2016 after years of feeling like they were not on the right career path (Terri was an actress and Katie a stylist.) They started WORM as a delivery service of a “Book and a bunch.” The idea was you would tell them all about someone you would like to gift, and they would choose a beautiful book for them by an independent publishing company and make a bunch of flowers with meaning to match. They would then wrap it beautifully and hand-deliver it to the recipient.
As time went on, they started to enjoy experimenting with flowers, which is what led them to where they are today, making big and small floral installations for a huge range of clients around the world.
Terri and Katie
We both live in East London, near our studio which is in Clapton. It’s a wonderfully creative area where there are lots of young startups all supporting each other. There is always something exciting going on somewhere. Our studio is at the bottom of the vicarage garden where Kristin and her husband, William, live. It was the church hall and we have rented a section of it from the church; it is a little creative haven. Kristin can just walk through her garden to reach us and passes through for a chat on her morning walk. We adore it!
We both grew up in the south of Ireland, Katie in the suburbs of Dublin and Terri on an island off of Cork. Both of our families always supported our creativity and never seemed to bat an eyelid at the many career changes we decided on along the way. Growing up in Ireland brings out a certain creativity in you that you don’t realise until you have taken yourself out of it. Ireland is saturated in it, through literature, storytelling, folklore and art. Everyone you meet can tell a good story in some way or another. I guess that’s what we do through our work with flowers (we are also big talkers!!)
We were both creative kids. Our earliest memories of being creative with flowers are the same. The May altar was such a huge thing growing up in Catholic Ireland. It’s a blue altar put up on the first of May in homes all across the land for Mary and her special month. You put a little statue of her up and surround her with flowers.
We both loved creating little vase arrangements to put on the altar every few days, making pretty. Recently for British Flowers Week, we collaborated with Kristin at London’s Garden Museum to create an installation based on this memory. We made the wild grassy coastal rock gardens of our childhood in the museum, and filled it with locally grown flowers with a little rock altar in the middle. Kristin made the most beautiful spirit flags that she hand-painted, which reminded us of running through the drying sheets in the garden to pick the precious flowers. It was so special for us to be able to recall these memories and bring them back to life in a beautiful collaboration.
Before WORM, we were both working in creative industries, but always at the hands of someone else. Making someone else’s vision was wonderful because it gave us so much experience and taught us to work hard. But as soon as we started our own thing and realised that all that hard work paid off directly to us, we knew we could never look back.
We decided to start the business in 2016 after we took a really introductory flower arranging course. It was one day a week for two months and we learned the very basics of flowers and how to work with them. We didn’t bother doing the second level of the course, and just made it up as we went along. We definitely took the long road, as most people go and have work experience to learn how their industry works; but we are glad now because we do it our way and that works for us.
Our favorite kind of work is collaborative, when there are no clients who might not get what you are trying to do. When we collaborate with Kristin, it is all about the seasons and a meeting of all three minds, which is wonderfully fulfilling.
We will sit in our studio together and drink tea, or in Kristin’s kitchen eating her amazing flaky pastry pie, and throw lots of ideas together until we have the start of something. There are always too many ideas; we have to whittle down to make something that makes sense to us all. Then we start creating and regrouping at different stages to show each other how far we have come. It’s always a really enjoyable experience.
Terri
We did what we set out to do. Very early, when we were coming up with ideas of what we could do as a company, we had one clear aspiration. As women in our early thirties, we were very aware that as we started to think about having families, we knew that the trajectory of our creative careers could be on the line.
You see it so often in creative industries—you go away for a while to have babies and you are at the bottom of the ladder when you come back, and struggle to get work. We wanted something that we could call our own, and something that gave us some autonomy over our creative lives. Today is the first day of my maternity leave before I go and have my first baby, and in six months’ time I can go back to being creative every day and being appreciated for it, and I am so proud of that fact.
Kristin
I am constantly inspired by the connection between creativity, the spirit and the domestic, and I enjoy Britain’s wealth of historic houses, museums and churches that spark my imagination on this. Right now I’m exploring how beauty in nature and art are touchstones for the divine, and how to make the unseen energy visible in our everyday lives.
WORM
We are inspired by so many places, and also by artists, gardens, music, and memories, but mainly for us it is the seasons. The seasons bring us the materials and most of the time that is enough. We are lucky enough to live in a part of the world that has very defined seasons, and all that rain in winter and spring brings the most wonderful payoff in summer, when colour just pops up everywhere and inspires so many projects for us.
Related Stories
The garden between the studio and the church vicarage. Portrait FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Kristin Perers, Katie Smyth, Terri Chandler
My home is located in a 19th-century vicarage; my husband is the vicar of St. Thomas Church, a Church of England church from that era in London’s East End. It was built to the elegant proportions of Georgian London architecture—five stories tall, thin and airy—on a terrace that is one of the oldest in this part of the city.
The house is home to my husband and me and sometimes our three (mostly) grown children. The house also plays a double act: linked directly to the church by way of the crypt, vestry and tower, it is a public space hosting a variety of gatherings for the church and community.
WORM ladies Katie Smyth (LEFT) and Terri Chandler (RIGHT) ON the church roof
When my husband was looking for solutions to bring life to the large and barren church hall, I thought instantly of WORM. I had collaborated with the florist duo WORM, photographing, amongst other projects, their bestselling book Wreaths, and I knew they had outgrown their current studio circumstances.
I also had a hunch that this creative duo would bring more to the church hall than just regular rent; they would bring an infectious energy, and with their Irish Catholic background, a certain simpatico conversation that would add layers to the dialogue of this multicultural community.
This is part of the challenge of maturity — to corral all these creative interests together.
As a photographer I create images. As a wife and mother I create something more elusive; a home, a life.
What blossomed is a creative collaboration between myself and WORM; a few words over tea…a morning stop-in as the bells rang in the tower above, marking the time of day. As the shared garden so visibly connected us to the seasons, we exchanged stories; the strong sense of history and particularity of the site affirming a strong sense of place. This challenged us in turn to ask questions around the spirituality that shaped our own practices.The site was no doubt sacred, it sang to us through the ritual that went on there and through the seasons. The communal garden is dug with parishioners’ ashes and a single apple tree, lasting perhaps from the ancient orchard. So if this land and the church felt ‘sacred’, what made it so? And how do we ‘take that home’ and make the sacred part of the everyday? And what would that look like?
I was born the middle of three children in Chicago. In 1968 our family moved to Florida, as my dad wanted to fulfill his dream of starting his own company (American Business Interiors is still going today, run by my brother, and just celebrated 50 years.) The freedom of a small town off the coast of Florida meant most of my childhood was spent outdoors, in a tree or in our rowboat on the Indian River.
My father is Swedish; our link with our ancestry informed family rituals and, even today, my interior aesthetic. I grew up as an Episcopalian in Florida and then lost touch with my Christian roots when I moved to New York. I only reconnected with this rich tradition, albeit in a new way, when I married my husband and became the vicar’s wife.
My passion for creating has always been there. In small town America in the 1970’s there was not much in the way of entertainment or even material goods. Making and crafting were a way to pass the time; a form of self-expression as well as necessity.
What I am doing now is combining the skills I have picked up in different stages of my life. I studied fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC and worked as a designer for many years, going on to become a stylist and then a photographer. Painting and drawing have always been an undercurrent of all of this.
Kristin Perers Wise Words
“There’s a time for everything in your life, but not for everything all the time.”
— My Mom, because she was a painter and an artist, and understood the creative yearning and heartache caused by the struggle between motherhood, marriage and a creative life ‘that calls you like a lover.’
Hand painting fabrics inspired by flowers in Kristen Perers’ studio collaborating with WORM London
At 57, my task now seems to be to corral all of this, and to bring it home into one unified endeavor, although that remains an ever-elusive task! My photography, painting, and textile work all are passions that I learned and skills I honed in different stages of my life. Being a vicar’s wife, I am beginning to see my creative role in a larger landscape of creating for our common life together.
The emotional influence of color is an underlying strand in my work as a photographer and painter. Perhaps this fascination is exaggerated by my experience of having lived in the extremes of color; a childhood in the bright vibrant hues of Florida, and my adult life first in NYC and then London, learning to admire the subtle shades of grey. I have a lineup of small glass jars, almost like a chemistry lab of color, collected in the Southwest of America; dirt and sand of the most breathtaking hues. It was collected upon my leaving America and emigrating to Europe—I wanted to take a bit of home with me.
My personal creative process is very intuitive and that’s why I like working with Katie and Terri; they are able to just completely jump into big, open, imaginary thinking. For instance, on our Garden Museum exhibition, we just sat and talked, writing down key words, then considered a few images that were more like thumbnails or place holders. I firmly believe in not using images too much at this stage—as you can get stuck with images and not go past them.
Words leave more room for the imagination at the beginning of projects. And you have to risk being foolish—to say the crazy thing and to work off-piste. The collaboration I did with WORM for the British brand Toast on the theme of “Pioneer” highlighted this, and challenged us to explore uncharted territories and be willing to go our own lonely way.
For all our collaborative projects, it is the colour story that really pulls it all together, so we definitely start with colors. I was really led by what Katie and Terri wanted to do—they wanted to work with dried flowers—the colors are quite burnt out and subtle, almost washed-looking.
We were trying to evoke the feeling of an Irish seaside garden. The colors were essentially derived from this concept, and I went to work creating fabrics to match this idea.
I’ve become very interested in natural dyeing as a sideline, and I’ve hosted dyer Kathryn Davey many times for workshops at the Flower Factory Studio. So the fabrics I create are more an extension of my painting, a combination of natural dyeing techniques and painting. I call them dip-dyed and hand-painted textiles.
So before our May altar project, we would have a meeting in the WORM studios, and then I would run home thirty metres up to the vicarage where I’ve built my studios. I have a rooftop terrace where I like to do my messy work like painting and dyeing; it is up in the trees on the roof of the church. I hang my fabrics on a string drying line and they dry in the sun and wind. This lends that unique tonal faded look to the fabrics, which I love.
Garden Museum May Flower collaboration
Our creative collaborations have bubbled over into the wider community, which is an area outside of the gentrified parts of Hackney. Our community is a real collision of culture, as our congregation is mostly African and Caribbean; there is an important Hasidic Jew community and also a strong Muslim community. Within a few months of moving here, Katie and Terri had gotten to know everyone in the neighbourhood—there was this incredible sense of outreach.
Another project that is very close to our hearts is the Haberdashery exhibition, inside a wonderful local Hackney community cafe. We go in there all the time to have a morning coffee, and the owner asked us whether we would consider exhibiting our work.
That exhibition was sparked off by a trip I did to Scotland with my husband. When I travel, I paint color swatches of the landscape, and I was very much inspired by my Scottish trip. At the same time, my husband was reading a book about ecology and the climate crisis and this idea that we are going to lose all the colors in our landscape as it becomes more burnt out. All those rich mossy greens and dark brackens will simply disappear.
I love creative collaborations and how they can take you to a new space that you may never have gone on your own. Alongside this, the church community and the buildings themselves have held our collaboration by providing both a physical space to explore our shared interest in the seasons, as well as a spiritual space where we are able to ask the bigger questions of our own place in the created order. As we face the catastrophe of climate change, this level of engagement seems particularly urgent.
Our exhibition was about looking at the landscape, and what we’re risking losing, and to make that connection. We take color so much for granted, but all the incredible color in the world is a gift.
I think my biggest accomplishment has been to look back and realize I have made a living, a life, as a freelance creative. I have morphed when the time came from being a fashion designer to a stylist to a photographer—and kept a roof over my children’s heads. I have ridden the wave of life; sometimes the crest, at times the depths, but I’m still surfing. I haven’t stayed safely on the beach and watched, although now I could use a little of that!
And the wonderful title of this magazine, What Women Create—well of course that has a multitude of answers; we create life, not just by giving birth to children, but as holders of ritual by passing down emotional knowledge. We are communicators to the next generation, even if we don’t use words but just actions. I have found myself in a place, a life I never dreamed of, and sometimes I feel like Dorothy, forever seeking home. This space, this place has called us—and my collaborations with WORM and the wider community—to make this home…while we are here.
Art is about the spirit, it touches into our faith, whatever that may be. Art can take you to a place, and take others to a place, that is beyond the everyday. It can touch parts of us that take us out of the ‘seen’ world to a place of mystery and grace.
We are, in our own way, yearning for meaning in our life, yearning to feel good about ourselves when we step outside the door. We question how we spend our money and want to live a life of integrity, and it becomes really hard when you get so many messages about how everything we do is a pollution. It feels so good to know that really our actions have a chain reaction in doing good in this world.
Terri Chandler and Katie Smyth started WORM in 2016 after years of feeling like they were not on the right career path (Terri was an actress and Katie a stylist.) They started WORM as a delivery service of a “Book and a bunch.” The idea was you would tell them all about someone you would like to gift, and they would choose a beautiful book for them by an independent publishing company and make a bunch of flowers with meaning to match. They would then wrap it beautifully and hand-deliver it to the recipient.
As time went on, they started to enjoy experimenting with flowers, which is what led them to where they are today, making big and small floral installations for a huge range of clients around the world.
Terri and Katie
We both live in East London, near our studio which is in Clapton. It’s a wonderfully creative area where there are lots of young startups all supporting each other. There is always something exciting going on somewhere. Our studio is at the bottom of the vicarage garden where Kristin and her husband, William, live. It was the church hall and we have rented a section of it from the church; it is a little creative haven. Kristin can just walk through her garden to reach us and passes through for a chat on her morning walk. We adore it!
We both grew up in the south of Ireland, Katie in the suburbs of Dublin and Terri on an island off of Cork. Both of our families always supported our creativity and never seemed to bat an eyelid at the many career changes we decided on along the way. Growing up in Ireland brings out a certain creativity in you that you don’t realise until you have taken yourself out of it. Ireland is saturated in it, through literature, storytelling, folklore and art. Everyone you meet can tell a good story in some way or another. I guess that’s what we do through our work with flowers (we are also big talkers!!)
We were both creative kids. Our earliest memories of being creative with flowers are the same. The May altar was such a huge thing growing up in Catholic Ireland. It’s a blue altar put up on the first of May in homes all across the land for Mary and her special month. You put a little statue of her up and surround her with flowers.
We both loved creating little vase arrangements to put on the altar every few days, making pretty. Recently for British Flowers Week, we collaborated with Kristin at London’s Garden Museum to create an installation based on this memory. We made the wild grassy coastal rock gardens of our childhood in the museum, and filled it with locally grown flowers with a little rock altar in the middle. Kristin made the most beautiful spirit flags that she hand-painted, which reminded us of running through the drying sheets in the garden to pick the precious flowers. It was so special for us to be able to recall these memories and bring them back to life in a beautiful collaboration.
Before WORM, we were both working in creative industries, but always at the hands of someone else. Making someone else’s vision was wonderful because it gave us so much experience and taught us to work hard. But as soon as we started our own thing and realised that all that hard work paid off directly to us, we knew we could never look back.
We decided to start the business in 2016 after we took a really introductory flower arranging course. It was one day a week for two months and we learned the very basics of flowers and how to work with them. We didn’t bother doing the second level of the course, and just made it up as we went along. We definitely took the long road, as most people go and have work experience to learn how their industry works; but we are glad now because we do it our way and that works for us.
Our favorite kind of work is collaborative, when there are no clients who might not get what you are trying to do. When we collaborate with Kristin, it is all about the seasons and a meeting of all three minds, which is wonderfully fulfilling.
We will sit in our studio together and drink tea, or in Kristin’s kitchen eating her amazing flaky pastry pie, and throw lots of ideas together until we have the start of something. There are always too many ideas; we have to whittle down to make something that makes sense to us all. Then we start creating and regrouping at different stages to show each other how far we have come. It’s always a really enjoyable experience.
Terri
We did what we set out to do. Very early, when we were coming up with ideas of what we could do as a company, we had one clear aspiration. As women in our early thirties, we were very aware that as we started to think about having families, we knew that the trajectory of our creative careers could be on the line.
You see it so often in creative industries—you go away for a while to have babies and you are at the bottom of the ladder when you come back, and struggle to get work. We wanted something that we could call our own, and something that gave us some autonomy over our creative lives. Today is the first day of my maternity leave before I go and have my first baby, and in six months’ time I can go back to being creative every day and being appreciated for it, and I am so proud of that fact.
Kristin
I am constantly inspired by the connection between creativity, the spirit and the domestic, and I enjoy Britain’s wealth of historic houses, museums and churches that spark my imagination on this. Right now I’m exploring how beauty in nature and art are touchstones for the divine, and how to make the unseen energy visible in our everyday lives.
WORM
We are inspired by so many places, and also by artists, gardens, music, and memories, but mainly for us it is the seasons. The seasons bring us the materials and most of the time that is enough. We are lucky enough to live in a part of the world that has very defined seasons, and all that rain in winter and spring brings the most wonderful payoff in summer, when colour just pops up everywhere and inspires so many projects for us.
The Women Create Foundation is a catalyst for small but significant strides to empower women creators through grants that help bring projects to life and foster innovation.
