found
Our signature designs are the pince nez or monocle or our use of timeless symbolic shapes reinvented while still carrying their original essence and significance. This fledging company's aim is to create some style with substance by producing art with facts, beauty with talisman qualities and jewels with Joy.
Through working with Joy Butler Markham and her team at The Manacare Foundation www.manacare.org.uk, a charitable self funded organisation, Found's hope is to help secure a sustainable income and a sense of fulfilment for some of the souls that have been displaced by one of the most tragic natural disasters any of us have known. The 2004 Tsunami's effects are still far reaching and through this endeavour we want to not only create stunning pieces to be enjoyed and magpied over by many but along with it facilitate the already essential work Joy's project is doing.
FInding Found
Joy and I met moons ago at a meaningful moment on my map. Darling Joy. Joy by name and joy by nature. I always describe her to others to be like a cat. Possessing grace, independence, with nine lives and always landing on her feet. You name it, she's done it. Our kinda girl. Has been a diamond dealer travelling all over the globe, has worked in a host of brave and bold occupations, in a myriad of places from Sierra Leone to the Philippines. Has set up charities and helped more spaces and souls than I could possibly list. She's lived and loved and lived again. A soulful soul and a funny one at that. Friend to many and all around good egg.
I was lucky enough to meet her at just the right place in time, namely Sri and when I needed some Joy the most. It was at a particularly perilous point in my own journey and she was as her name would suggest, a most welcome wink from mother nature that all was not lost. All my jewels however had just that week been pinched, the symbols of my life lost to the ether. Engagement and anniversary rings and other hallmarks of my identity that I had designed over the years and along with them, the very structure that they represented were gone and going.
It was though through my obsession rather than profession, photographing, that our paths first crossed. My love of the land meant looking at and recording not just its pleasure and treasures but its shadow self too, that being the Tsunami and its ripple effect. Upon our meeting and instinctively sensing something halcyon coupled with a healthy filthy taste in humour we promptly arranged a ladies what lush lunch, at which we discovered a long line in synchronicity. She too had just had all her jewels pinched, she too had married on New Year's Eve, she too had been so for 13 years, she too, she too and so on. There, there was my first sneaky suspicion that all this loss was in order to find some joy. Personally I've always loved sneaky suspicions as they tend to be right.
And so Found was founded, a company that hopes to create and contribute. I design, Joy and her team of angles make and I flog and we'd share any outcome.
By Mimi Doctor
