Amending, No. 1.

Amending is a collaborative project founded by Airyka Rockefeller and Taylor Pollack; part boutique, part workshop, part community conversation space, co-founders Taylor Pollack & Airyka Rockefeller explore the space between decorative and high arts while engaging with and highlighting Bay Area artists and craftspersons.

The first collection debuted in March 2016 at The Thing Quarterly in San Francisco. Amending No. 1 featured a selection of ceramic vessels commissioned from local potter Zoe Dering, flower arrangements by Rebekah Northway of The Petaler, as well as an afternoon of tea-tasting by Leaves & Flowers and tarot readings by local friends Sarah Coenen and Gillian Masland.

"Amending brings together a selection of garments, artworks and functional objects in order to highlight the blurry zone between 'retail' and 'art' -spaces, high-art and living-art, and to consider the simultaneous, seemingly contrary philosophies of material-cravings and minimalist-longings."

Amending considers clothing, art, objects and intentional spaces be living-arts, and as such, key aspects of our lives. With this in mind, Amending brings together a group of garments and domestic objects inspired by clothing-swaps and their implicit principle that when one parts ways with beloved belongings, others can be trusted to materialize.  Amending is drawn to objects with shared history, objects which compel a second life, and which have had, and will have, many owners over time.

Amending asks why we feel a powerful need to constantly bring things home, alongside a parallel longing to let go of our varied possessions. Even as we simultaneously admire the tenants of minimalism, we sway again and again into ‘maximalism.’ Amending’s response to this discrepancy in ourselves is to start a practice of collecting wherein items are gathered only to pass along. We invite visitors to dismantle our collection and build their own.

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To amend is to modify, to improve, and in this spirit, to insist that a well-designed, well-worn piece of clothing/furnishing can be modified, tended to, and passed along, rather than discarded. There have been subtle alterations to some of the collection: a raw cut here, new seam there, a rewiring, re-grouping of sorts; essentially these alterations are minimal, a mending of sorts.