.png)
Arts of Transformation
The process of practising an Art may become a materialised mirror of one’s own conditions, something often impossible to perceive through the labyrinth of mere introspection.
Who is creating?
What am I creating?
To whom do I dedicate it?
All answers are possible, if one remains open to receive whatever arises, and continues to seek.
Since ancient times, Inspiration has been carried through objective Art.
Alpensia
Botanical Textile Art
Botanical printing is the alchemy that happens when leaves meet fabric.
It begins long before the cloth touches the plants: in the seed of the leaf, the minerals it absorbed, the light it received. Then, in the act of gathering—in noticing colours, shapes, and veins, in receiving what the earth offers in that moment.
Each piece carries this encounter.
The process is both ancient and experimental.
Leaves, flowers, and bark are placed by hand onto natural fibers—silk, wool, cotton. First the fabric is mordanted; then follow the steps of wrapping, binding, and steaming, allowing the pigments to release and enter the cloth.
No two leaves are ever alike. No two impressions are ever alike.
Temperature, season, the minerals in the water, and the chemistry of each plant shape the final result. Every piece becomes a true one-of-a-kind: a dialogue between intention and what cannot be controlled.
We never know how it will appear.
Botanical printing is slow work.
It asks us to let something else speak. It offers what cannot be manufactured: the unrepeatable imprint of a living landscape.
What you hold is a trace of leaf and light,
a brief passage through the world,
a moment of nature carried into everyday life—
a testimony to impermanence.
Each piece is crafted in Switzerland using natural dyes.
Most of the leaves we work with come from the Swiss Alps, gathered by hand.
Oak, vine leaves, wild rose and rosehip, maple, European ash, walnut, cotinus, ginkgo, catalpa, ferns, wild geranium, wild roses, wild blackberries, and the mountain creepers—each plant brings its own presence, its own chemistry, its own way of leaving a trace.
From time to time, a few eucalyptus leaves arrive from Asturias, Spain.
Everything else comes from here, from these valleys and seasons.
Some plants offer their marks boldly, others softly; some reveal themselves only when the fabric moves in the light.
This is the essence of Alpensia’s botanical textile art:
the meeting of nature and craft,
the collaboration between leaf, fibre, water, and time,
the creation of pieces as unique and unrepeatable as the plants that shaped them.
Ceramics
Ceramics grew from a simple love for life.
Much of daily living unfolds through the things we hold — a cup, a bowl, a teapot.
They carry food and tea, but also warmth, memory, and culture.
The wish to make my own tableware came from wanting objects that feel alive in use —
pieces that hold warmth, bear traces of the hand,
and quietly become part of everyday life.
Before making comes a few questions:
how can form bring out the taste of food,
how can a teacup hold the first warmth of a cold morning,
how can something simple bring comfort in daily use.
Learning follows — trial, error, small discoveries.
Some days everything feels wrong: seams too stiff,
a nail mark on the clay, a curve that resists,
a teapot that doesn’t pour quite right.
Then there are days when the hand moves freely,
and things come together with quiet ease.
What once seemed a flaw becomes a living trace —
a small imperfection that feels true.
The process turns in circles like that,
between insistence and release,
expectation and acceptance.
Ceramics are, at heart, a search for balance —
between the useful and the beautiful,
between material and life itself.
Incense
Incense carries a certain weight in many cultures —
for some, it is linked to temples, rituals, and communication with the divine.
Yet beyond these sacred associations, incense has long been part of daily life in the East.
It is lit during tea, beside a musical instrument, before sleep,
to cleanse a room, to focus the mind, or simply to accompany silence.
It can be invisible, and yet it seems always present —
in the faint ember as it burns, in the thin veil of smoke that softens the air.
Making incense is a craft that brings together many dimensions:
culture, history, botany, chemistry, craftsmanship, and imagination.
It asks for knowledge of materials —
of how woods, herbs, and resins transform under heat,
and curiosity to trace their origins across lands and centuries.
It also draws from old texts and forgotten recipes,
from the ways scent once shaped space and thought.
Through countless experiments and small adjustments,
new formulas emerge — not to recreate the past,
but to understand it, and to find meaning in the present.
For me, incense is not only about fragrance.
It is about continuity — between the ancient and the modern,
between matter and spirit,
between the air and the person who breathes it.
Spagyria
