A belated Happy New Year to you all! We hope you have enjoyed restful and relaxing festive periods and that the new decade has wonderful things in store.
2019 was an important year for us. We marked thirty years since Tom’s first trip to Mexico and the inception of the Milagros adventure. In January of that year, our collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum came to an end, for their exhibition Friday Kahlo: Making Her Self Up (we helped supply the exhibition giftshop; you might recognise some of our tinwork).
We continued to sell our range of Philippe Starck-designed baskets, commissioned for Mama Shelter hotels, and welcomed the newest Mama Shelter (on Hackney Road) to the neighbourhood. We also collaborated with Kew Gardens, providing them with recycled glassware for their Dave Chihuly exhibition.
In the autumn, we celebrated Shoreditch Design Triangle by showcasing the work of La Muerte Tiene Permiso, a modern design studio based in Mexico and Europe, and we welcomed them with a pop-up mezcaleria organised in partnership with the delectable Sin Gusano. Later months brought the cold, and of course, The Day of the Dead, which we marked with the help of our neighbours and friends on Columbia Rd and Ezra Street. When the time came to try and best each other on our Christmas windows, we handed ours over to the mother-daughter duo of Chulita Design so they could make a winter wonderland of Harlequin taxidermy, dotted about with the odd alebrije. Then we rounded everything off with the most well-attended run of Christmas Wednesdays we’ve ever had in our twelve years on Columbia Road. Thank you for coming to fill the street with your song and good cheer, and thank for always for stopping by to say hello.
Our hopes for this year are to increase the number of collaborations we have between Mexican and UK artists, especially ceramicists, with a particular focus on our glassware, tiles, and baskets. So if you have any tips for who you’d like to see us working with, please send them our way! We’re also pleased to say we can now offer custom tinwork.
We leave you with all our best wishes for the coming year, and these words of wisdom from Howard Zinn:
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasise in this complex history will determine our lives… The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.”
