The Founder
One hand, two crafts
Mudélie is drawn, built and finished by one person, an artist trained in the classical figure, and a maker of twenty years who wrote the atelier around the work.
I’m an artist and a developer, a father, and, for the last year, someone who learned the hard way that beauty really does rise from the mud. Mudélie is where those threads meet: every piece begins as an original drawing at my desk in St Neots, and everything around it (the atelier, this site, the way an edition is held and numbered) I built by hand too.
It is a small studio on purpose. I would rather make a few things with real care than many things quickly.
The drawing hand
Trained in the classical figure
I studied drawing under Sheldon Borenstein and Glenn Vilppu: gesture, construction, anatomy and light, the slow fundamentals. Every release still starts the same way, graphite and gouache on cotton rag, built up mark by mark until the form arrives of its own accord.
The building hand
Twenty years of software
Alongside the art I’ve spent two decades as a full-stack developer. It means the atelier isn’t bought off a shelf. The editions, the numbered certificates, the fair holds and this whole storefront are written to serve the work, not the other way around.
Rising from the mud
Not a metaphor I chose lightly
Over the past year I went from 110kg to 82kg, with P90X doubles and a stubborn diet, most mornings before anyone else was awake. It wasn’t vanity. It was the same lesson the lotus keeps: that the good, clear things grow out of the dark, difficult ground, not in spite of it.
I have lived that lesson, but I did not invent it. If anything I see it far more often in other people than in myself, and most of all in women, who so often pour everything into everyone around them and wake one day to find their own life turned upside down. Becoming a mother can do that. So can a relationship that has quietly gone wrong, or a career that no longer fits.
The child is never the mud, and neither are you. The mud, if you have it, is simply the circumstances you have found yourself in. Once you can truly see that it is not you, only the ground around you, something changes. You can be still. You can stop thrashing to wade through it and let it firm a little beneath your feet.
And once it has firmed, you can decide to step out of it, if you want to, one foot at a time, at your own pace. Somewhere around forty, many of us arrive at exactly the point Carl Jung described: the beginning of a second life, where the work is no longer to be who everyone needed us to be, but to grow, on purpose, toward the light.
That is who these pieces are really for. Rooted in the real, reaching toward the light, drawn by someone still doing the rising, for everyone else still doing theirs.
Made to order, made by hand
Nothing sits in a warehouse
Each piece is made only once it’s yours. Editions are kept small, seventy-five, numbered and finished by hand, and the first of every edition is held back for the archive, never sold. It means a little patience while a piece is made, and in return something considered, traceable, and genuinely limited. You can watch it happen, step by step, in the atelier.