FIELD NOTES / NO. 001
LEARNING TO PAY ATTENTION
Bain Town, 2024
The neighborhood was filled with small clapboard houses standing close together, where families shared more than streets. They shared tools, stories, meals, music, and an aesthetic. Nothing existed in isolation. Every object seemed to carry the fingerprints of the people who had made, repaired, borrowed, or passed it along.
Long before I thought of myself as an artist, I was learning to pay attention.
As children, we rarely bought toys. We made them. We built kites from scraps of paper and pieces of wood. We carved spinning tops. We transformed old roller skates into homemade carts that carried us through the neighborhood. Every afternoon was an exercise in invention, not because anyone called it creativity, but because imagination was simply how things got made.
Looking back, I realize those objects taught me something much larger than craft. They taught me to see possibility where other people saw leftovers. They taught me that making begins with observation.
At home, another education was taking place.
Grandmother's House in Nassau, 2023 Photographed by Tavares Strachan
My mother was almost always sewing. The rhythm of fabric moving beneath the needle became part of the soundtrack of my childhood. Watching her work, I began to understand that making is a form of care. Patience has its own beauty. Precision has its own poetry. A finished object carries within it every decision that came before it.
Between the streets of Bain Town and my mother’s sewing machine, I inherited a way of looking at the world.
That way of looking has stayed with me.
Whether I’m walking through an archive, standing in the Arctic, searching for forgotten histories, or working with artisans to create something new, the process always begins the same way: by paying attention.
BASEC was born from that practice.
It is a place for the things that have taught me to look more carefully—for the objects, materials, landscapes, histories, and ideas that reveal themselves only when we slow down. Every edition begins with curiosity. Every collaboration begins with listening. Every object carries a story that stretches far beyond itself.
Bain Town, 2024
These Field Notes are an extension of that practice.
They are not simply stories about products. They are observations collected over a lifetime—notes on migration, craftsmanship, science, memory, color, history, preservation, and the quiet intelligence embedded in the everyday.
Everything begins the same way it began for me in Bain Town.
By learning to pay attention.