Meet Islyn

Islyn doesn’t remember much about the boat ride from Sicily, only that she sat under her mother’s skirt and ate red tomatoes from a cloth sack, the juice sticky and dripping on her bare legs. Islyn’s parents were archaeologists, so they believed in the stories behind things, and taught her to, as well.

As an only child, she grew up with her own imagination to sustain her, and the small, daily pleasures of life on Earth. She loved the sound of keys clacking and of men’s dress shoes on terrazzo. On hot days in Puglia, she wore that one particular white linen dress (the one with the open back), and leaned against marble in the piazza (you could tell it was real marble because it was so cold even though the day was so hot). She would go to the flea market and learn about the way objects conferred meaning. She could feel, in an antique bronze cup, the wild histories of those who’d touched it before.

She collected leather saddles and green glass from Turkish coasts that grazed her windowsills. She pressed Kyoto’s cherry blossoms between the pages of her journal and gathered bone-white wood from the New Mexican desert. As a teen, she drank warm beer with locals in highway Cambodian bars and walked through Roman ruins at dusk. She rode horses bareback in Kentucky and stopped to listen to violinists, neon-lit in New York subways. She knew all the names of the wildflowers on the Eastern seaboard. She dove from the red cliffs of Sardinia. Her lipstick was smudged, her hair was messy. She was effortlessly cool. She loved old cars with brown leather interiors, and vowed never to dye her hair once it went gray.

Islyn liked the way she could tell time in photographs by how long the shadows were. She liked when someone missed a spot shaving. She loved incense in cold stone churches and baskets of hibiscus flowers in Mexican groceries. She loved people, and wanted their lives to be as rich and beautiful as hers had been. So she built worlds for them. Sometimes this meant a house. Sometimes it meant a drink. Sometimes it meant a well-worn and passionate story about her travels. Whatever it was, she did it with her whole heart. Never cliche. Never boring. Always open and kind and with a lust for life and ideas.

Like the Islyn of our namesake, Islyn Studio believes in the stories behind things. We are not afraid to fail. We are not afraid to jump off cliffs into blue waters. We are not afraid of things we haven’t seen before. Or in the imperfect. We believe in learning by doing. We are good listeners. Our eyes are open and our hearts are wild. If we can, for a second, remind someone of a world that’s bigger and greater than the ones they’ve seen, then we’ve done our jobs.