About me

I wasn’t one of those creative children, always to be found drawing or making. I was more likely to be reading novel after novel, daydreaming while roller-skating up and down our street, or making up stories while playing with toys. I was never happier than when lost in imaginary worlds conjured up on the page, the screen, or in my own imagination. 

I did always love stationery. I deplored my own handwriting and dreamed of elegant curves, and wondered what it would be like to write with a quill (attempts at using a feather dipped in ink squeezed out of a fountain pen cartridge proved unsuccessful). I was fascinated by printing too. I loved playing with my mum’s typewriter, relished the scent of freshly duplicated school handouts, and would try turning everything with relief into a stamp.

In my teens I developed a love for words. I would write reams of letters to friends, page after page of journal entries, and questionable poetry. A switch in language as I crossed the Channel also changed my writing, and my relationship with words. My one creative outlet was slipping away. Instead I focused of collecting, curating, and shaping the world around me – my clothes, my house – with colours and objects inspired by history, places and stories. 

But I did also, eventually, come back to words, paper and ink. I experimented with letterpress printing, linocuts and rubber stamps, and dug out my old typewriter. I blogged about urban typography, falling in love with photography in the process. And then, I took an online calligraphy class. I was convinced I would be terrible at it, but the longing to not just collect, but also create, helped me make the leap, and just try. It was love at first stroke. 

After a few years I joined Instagram and started sharing my work, while revelling in the potential for telling stories, first visually and, increasingly, by writing in captions. My husband was incurably ill, with an uncertain life expectancy. Spending time creating, playing with calligraphy and photography, sharing little stories from my world, both real and imagined, became my escape. After he died, I plunged even deeper into creativity, as a way of processing and sharing grief, one photo and caption at a time, and as a source of meaning and joy in my new upside down world. 

I have explored even more ways to create along the way. I have learned bookbinding and paper making, and invested in my own tabletop press, rekindling my earlier fascination with printing. My work is increasingly informed by everything that came before: the novels I got lost in, my background in historic conservation, my home city of Oxford, my love of maps and the smell of books, and much more beyond. 

Making is how I escape, and how I dream. It is how I reconnect with a childhood magic of tales and make-believe, through the real-life alchemy of turning pulp into paper, paper into books, and ink into words – all to create beautiful objects that tell and inspire stories. 

You can hear more of my story in my podcast interviews for On the Irregular, The Craft and Creativity Found.

Contact me

Gaelle Jolly
hello@inkysquare.com