The Story

Everyday Hope.

Sometimes life splits you open. Sometimes you've just had a shocking month — or a couple of them. Both count.

Art really can help: something to look at, something to make, something to give when words don't work, and somewhere to be while you're figuring it out. Found by a human. Made by independent artists.

Thirty years in the making. Here at last, when I needed it — and still need it — the most.

↓ The story starts below

Four framed prints from the Anthology — an angel number 444 print for protection and stability, the letter F for Freedom, a Soar typographic print, and a woodland folk print showing fox, badger, hare, otter, squirrel and owl.

So… Here We Are

Let's start at the end.

I've spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to explain The Hope Anthology in complicated ways. It's actually quite simple.

I don't want to build another giant marketplace where everybody piles in and starts fighting their way up another search result.

There are brilliant independent artists everywhere, making things that somebody else would love to find. And there are brilliant humans out there too, sometimes going through something enormous and sometimes simply needing to find something that lands at exactly the right moment. Somewhere between the two are artists making work those people might need and love, without either of them necessarily having the faintest idea the other exists.

Hope helps with the finding.

Some of those things are To Keep — art and objects made by the artist. Some are To Make — patterns, templates and guides where the artist gives you the beginnings and your own two hands do the rest. The Hope Anthology finds and curates both.

I don't want to build another giant marketplace where everybody piles in and starts fighting their way up another search result. The artist already has somewhere to sell their work, and I don't need to put another shop between them and the person who wants to buy from them.

Hope is the bit in between: the looking, the choosing, the context, the recommendation. The "I found this and thought of you."

And when you find something that feels like yours, I send you on your way to the artist who made it.

To Keep To Make

Theresa at a table working through fox sketches, surrounded by coloured pencils and books on colour theory.

Humans, Basically.

The more I work on Hope, the more I know it comes back to people.

Which is slightly ironic for someone who spent a very large part of their career working in digital. But there we are.

Connection doesn't always arrive announcing itself as connection.

Somewhere along the way, we handed an awful lot of the job of finding things — and increasingly finding each other — over to machines. I'm not remotely anti-technology; in fact, I'm extremely pro-technology. I'm a huge geek. Digital can be every bit as much my happy place as sitting down and trying to work out what an otter might look like in stained glass.

But there are some things humans are very good at too. We notice things, we tell stories, and we make connections that make absolutely no commercial sense whatsoever.

Not because I think a painting or an origami hamster is going to swoop in and sort somebody's life out. It's much more ordinary than that. Art and making can simply be another resource, another thing alongside everything else: something that reminds you where you are, something another person made that unexpectedly makes you feel understood, something to make when you need your hands and your brain doing something together, or something you give to another human because words just aren't working and somebody else has somehow made the thing you couldn't quite say.

Finding something and feeling, somehow, that it found you back.

Connection doesn't always arrive announcing itself as connection.

That matters to what I want Hope to become. I want people to be able to wander into it themselves, but I also want it to become somewhere that the people and organisations already supporting others — community organisations, recovery groups, mental-health organisations, social prescribers and others — feel comfortable sharing with the humans they work with.

Not because Hope has the answer. Bloody hell, no.

But because sometimes finding support should just feel lush.

For Organisations

A hand drawing the fifth version of a fox design in pencil, with the finished printed version and a closed laptop on the desk beside it.

Hello… Anybody Out There?

Oddly, creating the art turned out not to be the thing that gave me the most imposter syndrome.

For years, I knew digital from the other side. I'd built hundreds of websites, managed huge digital projects and worked with some enormous organisations.

"So how would I find you?"

You have no idea how much work launching an iPhone through a major telecoms website used to involve nearly twenty years ago.

I've probably spent thousands of hours thinking about search, navigation and what people did when they arrived somewhere online. I more than understood this stuff.

Or at least I thought I did.

Then I became the tiny independent person at the other end of it, and that is a very different digital world.

I could make something, put it online, be terrified that everybody would hate it, and then discover that the next part of being an artist apparently involved becoming a top-class photographer, copywriter, SEO expert, social-media manager, video creator, advertiser, analyst and possibly a performing monkey — all while, ideally, finding some time to make the actual thing.

And, in addition, be a mum.

Then somebody asked me a ridiculously simple question:

"So how would I find you?"

Ah. There it was.

The more artists I looked at, the more I saw the same problem: absolutely extraordinary work sitting in corners of the digital world while the people who might need and love it simply didn't know it existed.

And it wasn't necessarily because the artist hadn't done the work. Of course they could have the right keywords. Of course they could have great photography, strong descriptions and all the SEO boxes ticked. They could be posting, tagging, optimising and doing everything they'd been told they were supposed to do.

And still not be found.

Because doing everything correctly doesn't necessarily mean the work is already popular, trending, attracting engagement or producing all the other signals digital platforms use to decide what gets seen.

On the other side were people searching through an almost unimaginable amount of stuff, increasingly being shown whatever that same digital machinery had decided was most likely to perform.

That isn't evil. It's just not the same thing as curation.

And I think we've lost a little of that: the independent shopkeeper who knows the strange little thing on the back shelf; the librarian who says, "This one isn't very popular, but I think you'll like it"; the friend who sends you an artist because they've just thought, Oh my God, this is so you.

Those choices aren't based on what everybody else likes. They're based on another human knowing something about you.

The Hope Anthology is my attempt to put a human back into that bit.

I also knew by then how brutal the other side could be because I'd lived it: getting something out there, watching it disappear, getting back up, trying something else, learning, changing it, wondering whether anybody actually wanted what you were making or whether you were simply shouting into an enormous digital void — and then doing it all again tomorrow.

There's a strange thing that happens when you make something and put it into the world. It stops being entirely yours. That can be terrifying, but it can also be the whole point.

For Artists

Theresa outdoors with her partner and young son on a bright day, sunlight flaring across the photograph.

The Scenic Route

Looking backwards, it's almost annoyingly neat.

Art, technology, information, websites, ecommerce, marketing — even being a bloody librarian.

Some of the ingredients for Hope came from work and knowledge. Quite a lot of them just came from life going completely off piste.

Apparently I'd been collecting bits of what would eventually become the mission behind The Hope Anthology for years without having the faintest idea that was what I was doing.

And then there are all the slightly less CV-friendly ingredients: the fuck-ups, IVF, becoming a mum, sobriety, losing people, finding people, discovering things about myself considerably later than would have been convenient, starting again, and the repeated discovery that life has very little respect for whatever sensible plan you thought you had made for it.

Some of the ingredients for Hope came from work and knowledge. Quite a lot of them just came from life going completely off piste.

For years I thought the different versions of me didn't particularly belong together. There was the arty bit and the geek bit, the corporate version and the person underneath it, the bits of life that flattened me and the bits that eventually built something different in their place.

Looking backwards, they make considerably more sense.

Because I've somehow arrived at something that needs almost every single bit of it.

To some people, discovering that only afterwards might be slightly irritating. To me, it has felt like the most fantastical gift.

Theresa in a field at sunset, wind in her hair, looking directly at the camera.

The Prawn Sandwich of Destiny

No, this isn't clickbait. There really was a prawn sandwich.

And it genuinely changed my life.

And something happened in my brain that I can only describe as a lightning bolt from the gods.

The Big Prawn Epiphany

At 18, I had more or less decided that education and I were done. I'd spent three years doing performing arts (AKA getting hammered on cider and being an idiot), and by then I was far more interested in going out, partying and earning enough money to carry on doing both.

University? Absolutely not.

I was working behind the bar at a golf club and, as far as I was concerned, that would do nicely.

In retrospect, this may have been one of several points in my life when a modern-day ADHD diagnosis would have been screaming rather loudly from the sidelines.

I'll try to keep the actual prawn bit brief.

One day, after 18 holes of golf, a woman came up to the bar and ordered a prawn sandwich.

Fine. She wanted no butter.

Fine. She wanted low-fat mayonnaise.

Fine.

Except then she asked me if I could pick out the big prawns for her.

And something happened in my brain that I can only describe as a lightning bolt from the gods.

I was not doing this for the rest of my life.

Genre. Whatever That Was.

A single white feather lying on wet grey tarmac.

I went home that night to the Housing Benefit-funded, mould-infested, freezing-cold, damp B&B I was living in and filled in a university application. I had fairly heroic spelling problems (still do), absolutely no idea how to write an academic essay and no particularly compelling evidence that higher education and I were destined for one another.

Somehow — whether through luck, timing, the universe giving me a shove, or simply one university needing the numbers — I got in.

I started with a major in Drama and a minor in English, which was slightly ironic because I didn't actually have the qualifications I was supposed to have to study the English part. I turned up to my first English lecture, the lecturer used the word "genre", and I did not, at that point, know what the word meant.

I walked out of the lecture theatre.

But to that university's enormous credit, they gave me room to flip-flop around for a year while I worked out what on earth I was doing. And I really did flip-flop.

I'd arrived in higher education without a lot of the academic foundations everybody else seemed to have acquired somewhere along the way. I could think, create and work things out, but spelling, essays, academic language and the whole machinery of formal education often felt as though somebody had handed me the instructions halfway through.

There are several points in this story where, nowadays, someone probably would have gently slid an ADHD assessment across the table.

Eventually, somewhere amongst all that wandering around, I found the combination that would end up following me for the next thirty years — and still does: being a geek and being an artist.

I went on to study IT with Art and Design, and an entirely different version of my life began.

All because one woman wanted the big prawns.

I'm not sure I've ever been so grateful to a menu item in my entire life. Or ever will be again.

A Surprisingly Convincing Adult

I spent the next thirty years building a "proper career", and I was good at it — often very good at it. I understood systems, digital, people and how enormous projects fitted together, but there was always something scratching away underneath all of it: the creative bit, and the part of me that didn't particularly want to spend the rest of her life being terribly competent at things that belonged to somebody else.

Reader, it was not entirely me.

So here we are.

The Unofficial Curriculum

Of course, the prawn sandwich was hardly the last occasion on which life decided to rewrite the plan. A marriage ended (I believe I even outdid Britney on that one…), I lost a parent, and things I had assumed were permanent turned out not to be. Then I found my person when I wasn't remotely looking for one, went through IVF and became a mum — which, like many, many women, I found I was NOT a natural at, and which was the hardest thing I had ever done. Sobriety came soon afterwards.

Much later came another explanation I hadn't particularly been expecting: an ADHD diagnosis, and the strange experience of looking back over decades of yourself and realising that some of the things you'd spent years judging yourself for might finally make a bit more sense.

There has been a lot of finding myself, losing myself and finding another version. For a long time I think I believed the goal was to get all of this sorted, to reach some mythical point at which I had finally become the finished version of me.

I don't really believe that anymore.

Still Figuring It Out

Somewhere amongst all of this, I started making again. Not because I'd discovered some grand theory about creativity and wellbeing. I just knew that when my hands and brain were absorbed in making something, my mind had somewhere else to go for a while.

I don't think art fixes us. I think it gives us something to look at and somewhere to be while we're figuring it out.

Slowly, the artwork became part of the same conversation: Who am I now? What do I actually want to say? What do I want around me while I'm working that out? And could something I make give somebody else a place to be while they're working theirs out too?

Not fixed. Not saved. Just a little less alone in it.

It was time to actually find myself again.

I'm still doing that.

All of Our Versions

Mine happens to be a bit woo. Yours might not be.

Two things I believe with my whole being.

Somewhere in all of the fighting, collapsing, getting up and doing it again, I started wondering whether I could make something that helped somebody else in the way art and making had helped me. But the other thing I've come to understand is that Hope is much bigger than the things that happened to me.

An artist doesn't need to have survived something terrible to belong here. A pattern designer doesn't need a story about recovery. And the human finding their work doesn't need to be standing in the middle of some enormous life-changing event either.

Sometimes life has completely split you open. Sometimes you've just had a really shitty month. Both count.

Neither the artist nor the person finding them has to produce their emotional credentials at the door, and not every piece of work needs to symbolise the eternal resilience of the human spirit. A pattern for a stained-glass otter is allowed to just be a really bloody good otter.

Sometimes the meaning is in the work, sometimes it comes from the person who made it or the person who finds it, and sometimes you simply want to sit down and make something because you want to make it. No particular reason required. That's why The Hope Anthology has room for it all.

My own work wanders happily into symbolism, meanings, nature, numbers and whatever other rabbit hole I've found myself disappearing down this week. I like things that can carry meaning without necessarily explaining themselves.

But The Hope Anthology turned out not to be a home for different versions of me. It was meant to bring together humans making things that have something to say, and other humans who might want to hear them.

All of our versions. All of our reasons.

I think hope is like that too. It doesn't always arrive as some enormous revelation. It can be incredibly small.

And perhaps that's the common thread running through all of this: not that every artist has the same story, not that everybody finding them needs the same thing, and not even that we all agree on what hope looks like.

That's The Hope Anthology.

Collective

Something worth being part of.

New designs, behind-the-scenes making, and the occasional reminder that you're doing better than you think. No noise. No pressure. Just the Anthology

Join the Collective