A quiet week of writing
Notes toward the first edition of the Bloom field guide — a small printed companion mailed to verified collectors.
This week the studio was mostly quiet. No new pieces, no shipping, no calls. Just the desk by the window and a stack of notebooks that had been waiting a long time to be read. We made tea twice a day and let the phones go dark by four.
What the field guide is
The field guide has been on the table for about a year. It is not a catalogue and it is not a manifesto. It is a small printed book — cotton cover, sewn binding, roughly the weight of a paperback — that tries to say plainly what Bloom is, how the studio works, and what collecting a piece actually means over the long arc of a life.
It has chapters on the materials, on why we number the way we do, on how to live with a piece over years rather than months, on what happens when a piece needs to be re-framed or moved between houses. There is a chapter about lending work to friends. There is a chapter about grief, because at some point every collection meets it.
"A small book that a collector could keep on the shelf next to the piece itself."
How it will reach you
The first edition will be mailed to verified collectors ahead of Chapter One. There will not be a digital version. Some things want to be held. If your address on file is out of date, the concierge can help you update it before we go to print in August.
More notes as the pages take shape. The next entry will probably be about the paper — we spent Thursday afternoon at the mill and have a lot to say about it.
Keep reading
A new salon in Paris
This month, we added a new salon in Paris. Alongside, we acquired a rare piece from the 2022 series — a special drop follows next month.
Chapter One is nearly here
The first 669 artworks are being prepared for release on September 15. Every piece has passed through the studio's final review.
The first exhibition opens in October
For ten days in October, fifty works from Chapter One will be shown in a former tea house on the eastern edge of Kyoto — the collection's first physical exhibition.
How we frame a piece
Every Bloom piece leaves the studio in a frame we make ourselves. A note on the wood, the glass, the tag on the back, and why the process takes as long as it does.