Tall Ships Makers - Introducing Agate & Ayre

Agate & Ayre has become a staple at many of the UKs best gift shops. For the Tall Ships Project, April Hay, the creative force behind the company, has pushed her usual practice into new areas and some great collaborative work.

Hello! My name is April Hay and I’m a digital textile designer inspired by geology. I founded my brand, Agate & Ayre in 2021 to share my passion for the outdoors through creating bold and colourful textiles celebrating the unique Scottish landscape. I sew my designs into a range of accessories for fashion and home that allow you to bring a piece of the outdoors, in.

Growing up in Aberdeen, my favourite times were spent on the beaches of the North-East of Scotland - I never left without a rock in my pocket and sand in my shoes. I love imagining the journey that one rock has taken before ending up in my hands. There is so much inspiration in the natural world, and it really excites me that I get to share it through my textile designs. I don’t have a scientific education but, through connecting with geologists and other enthusiasts, I have learnt a great deal and love to share this in ways that are visual and accessible.

Agate & Ayre textiles start life as a series of photographs, I capture these in various ways: on my phone, my camera or through a microscope. I layer these images on photoshop, creating artworks, playing with dramatic contrast and bold compositions.

During my last year at Gray’s School of Art, I begun to explore the relationship between science and design, how one can inspire the others way of thinking and push innovation through collaboration. For my Tall Ship Maker’s Programme proposal, I wanted to look at an area of geology I was completely unfamiliar with. Through my own collaboration with scientists and other science artists, I will highlight a material that is often overlooked: Sand.

I’ve been busy connecting with sand enthusiasts across the globe to find and swap samples of sand from the 5 stops across the Tall Ships Race route. Aberdeen sand was missing from a few collections, so I’ve made a few collectors very happy people! What has been so lovely for me, is hearing how excited people were to hear that sand is being celebrated through my art. I’m so used to speaking to rock enthusiasts who are delighted to see granite or agate on one of my scarves, but I must admit, before this project I didn’t realise the scale of the love of sand across the globe.

So far, I have been looking at the different samples through my microscope at 100x and 200x magnification and it’s been fascinating picking out the different materials I recognise. I'm also just back from a meeting with Dr Joseph Armstrong at Aberdeen University to pick his brains as to what the sands are made up of. We looked at my samples through their SEM or Scanning Electron Microscope with the help of technician John Still, documenting them in different ways and gathering inspiration for my final textile designs. Iona Copely, another technician within the department is also experimenting with creating a thin section of my Kristiansand sample for me to examine and I can't wait to see how she gets on.

I've also been working with the Centre for Advanced Textiles at Glasgow School of Art to print the fabric I'll be using for the final products. They have found a wool crepe which mimics the feel of sand, I'm currently brainstorming what products I could make from it.

I hope that you’re as excited as I am about where this project is heading, I knew I would enjoy this process, but it’s exceeded all my expectations. This is the first truly experimental and collaborative project I’ve been given the chance to work on, and it’s given me the confidence to seek out more opportunities like this in future to further my practice. It’s been eye-opening to connect with so many different disciplines and hear their enthusiasm for this project! I’ll never look at sand the same way again.

To follow along on my progress, I’ll be documenting the project on my Instagram @agateandayre and I’d love if you signed up to my newsletter on my website, www.agateandayre.com. I send a monthly journal with sneak peeks of new work, any upcoming in person events or exhibitions and general excitement about anything geological!