Holding My Work Still - Notes from Top Drawer Jan S/S26

I didn’t want to write a neat summary of Top Drawer. I wanted to stay close to how it actually felt: disorienting, affirming, tiring, steadying, and unresolved in a useful way. This is a reflection on holding my work still long enough for other people to meet it, and what that asked of me.

Top Drawer compresses time in a strange way. Three days stretch and fold in on themselves until conversations blur and your body forgets what stillness feels like. You speak to dozens of people, often for only a few minutes at a time, and yet some of those exchanges lodge themselves deep enough that they follow you home. I arrived knowing this would be intense, but still underestimating how much of the experience would happen internally. Not in the logistics, not even in the conversations, but in the quiet, repeated decisions about how much of myself I was willing to bring forward and how much I was tempted to tuck away to make things easier.

I came in already aware that my work doesn’t fit neatly. It never has. It lives somewhere between categories: not quite cards, not quite sculpture, not quite gift, not quite art in the traditional sense. It’s small, text-led, emotionally specific, and slow by design. Trade shows, by contrast, are built on legibility. They reward work that can be understood quickly, shelved easily, and explained in a sentence or two while someone calculates margins in their head. Knowing that, I felt the familiar tightening begin almost as soon as I set up. The impulse to pre-empt confusion. To explain faster than necessary. To make my work smaller in energy, even if it was already small in scale.

The scale question came up immediately, and often. People would pause, lean in, and ask if the pieces were cards. Not unkindly. Not dismissively. Simply trying to orient themselves. In the past, I would have jumped in with a long explanation, cushioning the correction, apologising for the size, reassuring them that there was still value here despite its quietness. This time, I tried something different. I answered plainly. “No, they’re artworks. I work small by choice.” And then I stopped talking. That pause felt enormous. It felt like standing still when everything in me wanted to rush forward and smooth the moment over. But in that stillness, something shifted. The work had space. The person had space. The conversation either deepened, or it didn’t, and either outcome felt cleaner than the frantic over-explaining I’d defaulted to for years.

What I began to notice, slowly, was that the people who stayed with the work needed time. They read things twice. They stood quietly. They picked pieces up and put them down again. These weren’t quick, transactional interactions. They were thoughtful, embodied ones. People said things like, “I’ve never seen anything like this,” or “Your work feels very human,” or simply, “I keep thinking about that phrase.” Those comments didn’t come with urgency. They came with a kind of considered attention that felt rare in such a busy environment. And with that came a realisation that landed gently but firmly: explaining faster doesn’t mean being understood. Often, it just means interrupting the process.

There were, of course, people who didn’t stay. People who clocked the scale, the slowness, the emotional specificity, and moved on. Earlier versions of me would have taken that personally. Would have folded it into a story about not being enough or not being right for this kind of space. This time, I noticed the sting without spiralling around it. Not everything is meant for everyone, and unfamiliarity isn’t a flaw. It’s just unfamiliarity. Letting those moments pass without internal collapse felt like a quiet victory, even if no one else could see it.

As the days went on, I realised I wasn’t performing in the way I sometimes do. I wasn’t pitching, or scanning faces for approval, or steering conversations toward outcomes. I was paying attention. To how people held the work. To which pieces stopped them. To the difference between politeness and genuine curiosity. To how my body felt when I allowed silence to exist instead of rushing to fill it. This wasn’t the energetic, charismatic version of showing up that trade shows often celebrate, but it felt truer. More sustainable. More aligned with how the work actually comes into being.

That doesn’t mean it was easy. The noise, the lights, the constant decision-making wore me down in ways I felt in my bones by the third day. There were moments when I wanted to disappear entirely, when my nervous system felt scraped raw by the sheer density of the environment. There were moments when someone walked past without stopping and my brain tried to turn that into a referendum on my relevance. In those moments, I had to remind myself, repeatedly, that a trade show is not a judgment on your worth, that a passing glance is not a rejection, and that someone else’s confusion is not something you are obliged to immediately fix.

One of the most striking things, looking back, is how little the work needed me to rescue it. It stood there quietly, doing what it does best. Being deliberate. Being specific. Being itself. And the people who connected with it did so without persuasion. One conversation in particular stays with me, with someone whose work I’ve admired for years. The kind of person I might previously have approached with a sense of hierarchy already in my head. We talked, genuinely talked, about shops, about slowness, about how hard it is to protect work that doesn’t want to be rushed. At one point I heard myself say, calmly and without shrinking, “My work might not fit neatly, but I think that’s what makes it special.” I didn’t brace for impact. I didn’t soften it. I meant it. And that felt new.

I’ve noticed a pattern in myself over time. I grow, I stretch, I enter new rooms, and then, once I’m there, I start to make myself smaller. Not because anyone tells me to, but because some part of me still believes that taking up space is provisional. That confidence must be rationed. That visibility should come with an apology attached. Top Drawer quietly disrupted that pattern. Not by handing me external validation, but by putting me in a position where I had to decide, again and again, whether I trusted my own work enough to let it stand on its own.

Being surrounded by so much output also sharpened something for me. There is a particular pressure in rooms like that to streamline, to adapt, to smooth off the edges of your practice in order to fit perceived demand. Standing there with my small, text-led, emotionally precise pieces felt almost defiant, though not loudly so. More like a steady refusal. This is the pace. This is the scale. This is how I work. You don’t have to want it, but I’m not going to contort it to make it easier to categorise.

By the end of the third day, I was deeply tired, but it wasn’t the frantic exhaustion that comes from over-performing. It was the quieter fatigue of having stayed present. Of having held my ground without hardening. Packing down felt careful, almost tender, like closing a book I’d been inside for a while. I left without a neat conclusion, without a clear list of outcomes or next steps, but with something more valuable: a steadier sense of trust in my own way of working.

What comes next doesn’t need to be dramatic. I’m not rushing to pivot or scale or suddenly become louder. If anything, Top Drawer has reinforced the importance of staying with what’s already here. Continuing to make work at the pace it asks for. Letting conversations unfold over time rather than forcing them into tidy resolutions. Paying attention to where the work naturally wants to go, rather than where I think it should go to be more easily understood.

There will be follow-ups, emails, slow developments, things that take shape gradually rather than all at once. I’m open to that. I’m learning that progress doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it just feels like standing more comfortably in your own skin, even when the room is bright and busy and full of expectations.

For now, that feels like enough. Not a conclusion, but a continuation. Holding the work still. Letting it meet people. Letting myself be changed by the encounter without losing my shape.