Dreamers & Travellers: The story behind the Macrame Collection

When you experience a life changing moment and you are ‘scattered’ away from your natural environment, that place of birth, with all its familiarity, you experience a darkness like no other.

This Collection was co-designed by my husband Simba Nyawiri and myself in 2019 after our son died in 2018. Suddenly the longing for home was so overwhelming. As immigrants there is always the enchantment of travelling away from home, with a dream that you shall return to that place you began the journey one day. For some of us, we have been in ‘unfamiliar’ spaces for so long, and that dream of returning home was gone.

We experience loss of family, personal losses, and we learn to cope, and in our ‘moment’, I felt so deeply that I could have carried the loss of a child better if I were home , with my mother's comfort, with familiar things around me. We began to think about dreamers and travellers, and how even though we were so far away from unfulfilled dreams and regained memories, there were always roots connecting us, roots that could not be cut off as they directed us back to that place of hope whenever we felt swayed.

Dreamers and Travellers was born. The collection reflects hope and passion entwined in culture, encounters with the ‘other’, places travelled and faces we will never forget. The roots interpreted in the tassels that appear throughout the collection, grow longer and are strong. They represent calmness and clarity even in times of pain. This collection was a part of our journey to healing- the experience of these pieces was a gift not only to ourselves, but to many others who share our story of pain and a longing for a place called ‘home’.