Garments to Live In

Jess Porter, a proofreader, and Max Porter, the writer of books including Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, live in Bath with their children. The colourful rooms of their home are filled with books and artworks. Doors are covered with collaged notes and drawings, and pieces of intricate weaving are pinned on the wall. Among the found objects and treasured gifts are the inevitable accumulations of family life, the muddy trainers, empty cereal bowls, shopping lists and the recurring problem of a deflated basketball. In the middle of all this sits a large oak kitchen table - the centre of their daily life. Its surface, marked with paint and glue, bears witness to the talking, eating, reading and making that constitute their time together as a family. "There’s not much that we don’t do at this table," says Max. That includes his own writing, which often happens in this polyphonic place of things and people and ideas.

Books naturally form a central part of their home. Jess works at Persephone Books, the independent publisher that reprints neglected classics by women, and she is "the girl that books built" in Max’s eyes. Jess says that reading is one of the main ways she expands her sense of the world and of other people. "Reading is life, one of the main ways that you can expand your knowledge of the world, and also your empathy." And their lives have indeed grown to encompass literature, music and theatre and Max frequently speaks to the capacity of collaboration to build something playful, expansive and meaningful.

"I feel like the better I'm listening, the better the work will be. I finally work out what my writing means when I'm talking about it with other people, or I'm seeing it translated into other people's minds or thoughts or languages."

A sense of discovery in their lives extends from their home into their tangled garden and to the walks Max and Jess often take together with their dog, following the towpath as it curves past houseboats and the old graffiti-daubed bridge with the kingfisher in the trees, towards the woods and the stone circles beyond. These daily journeys have become almost a ritual event for the couple, and they notice when the fruit ripens in the hedgerows, when leaves turn golden, and what time the swifts arrive. "I kind of measure things this way," says Max, but his awareness goes beyond a private reflection and speaks to the pressing ecological concerns that his writing often addresses too.

Max might be reluctant to call himself a maker, but the beautiful objects he makes from wood, clay and cardboard turn fallen trees and domestic leftovers into elevated objects, recalling Joseph Cornell's miniatures or Joseph Beuys’ vitrines. A series of small clay pots sits above the fireplace and a wooden chapel built from balsa wood is painted in Yves Klein blue. There are bright swirling paper vases (only semi-functional things), alongside bowls of hazelnuts or stones, and whatever else might find its way in from outside.

And like all the best collectors of ideas and things, in this home things do not seem to stay still for long. Jess’s table loom has been sitting quietly these months but gets called to life to make her woven fragments in soft colour palettes from the landscape around them. And all of these things are there to be swapped and given away, with others taking their place, such as the ‘rubble balls’ (basketball-sized orbs of concrete with fragments of brick, sandstone or granite embedded in them) given by Max’s godfather.

Max and Jess’s careful relationship with materials, the seasons, and perhaps a fatigue of our hyper consumerist society, finds a connection in the way they dress. They both tend to wear variations of the same thing for years. Jess was born on the winter solstice, and for her the change into colder months is welcomed rather than endured. That pleasure is captured by Jess when she says, "I just can’t imagine being happier than I am in a cardigan."

And so, when the socks or elbows of a beloved item wear through, the repair also becomes part of the biography of the thing, and Jess is an excellent mender. Sometimes Max also sends a jumper to his mother who lives in Devon to be patched and always receives it back in beautifully discordant tones. In that way, a garment becomes part of their lives through the repetition of wear and softening of time and as time goes it feels more like theirs, and they even feel that they become more like each other.

For Max and Jess, home is made through lightness and repeated acts of attention. Sharing a table, repairing a jumper, noticing when birds arrive, or friends leaving (their heads and arms filled with gifts and ideas). "Life is the thing," as Max puts it and it is in the care, the wear, the exchange that it all begins to come alive.