Capturing Our Home Grounds | With Georgie Watson

About a month or so ago, myself (Sam, Head of Marketing), Issy (Community Manager), and Felix (Website & Product Positioning) sat down on google meets for our morning meeting to discuss content ideas for the coming months. The goal was to come up with collaboration ideas with people who are doing something interesting and also share our fundamental value of preferring to spend their days outdoors.

A lot of ideas were thrown around, but one person in particular stood out: Georgie Watson. For context, I spent most of my childhood and teens with Georgie, being dropped off to school, cooked for (and potentially kept in line from time to time). If you haven’t guessed it, as well as being our first official WiDEYE collab artist, she’s also my Mother.

So why did this collab stand out?

For the past 10 years, Georgie has dedicated herself to the art world. Her main focus at the moment involves capturing the world around you as the day evolves. Specifically, a lot of her work is centred around locations near Rye and the surrounding area.

With our production unit in Rye Harbour, capturing the location through one of Georgie’s pieces felt like an obvious choice for our next collaboration.

So what’s happening with the collab?

We commissioned a painting that captures the moment just after twilight as the sun rises above Rye Harbour (a 5–minute walk from where all our products are made) – I also captured the process with my camera, following a very early morning start on a frosty Sunday morning.

As a thank you to all our customers, we’re also going to be giving away a mounted print of the painting alongside a shower bar explorer set. We'll reveal more details on this soon.

The day of the painting

With painting, it’s all about light. Checking the weather the night before, the clearest part of the day would be the very start. To get the most out of the morning, this meant getting to the red hut at Rye Harbour for 5:45 – just before sunrise.

So we dragged ourselves out of bed at 5 am (although Milo didn’t seem to mind). As amazing as the morning was, the main thing I’ll remember is losing all feeling in my fingers after not listening to my mum’s wise advice of bringing gloves.

Besides the cold, we got really lucky that morning. With winter rolling in, it was one of the few opportunities we had to capture the moment without being drenched and blown sideways across Rye Harbour.

The frame Georgie chose to focus on highlights the morning sun rising from beneath the Atlantic Ocean, with the red hut appearing as a silhouette just in front of us. Anyone who’s visited Rye Harbour before will know what we mean when we say the red hut.

About the artist

If you want to find out a bit more about Georgie and the work she does, head over to her Instagram or website at www.georgiewatsonart.com