why I started the messy formist (an origin story)

The Messy Formist didn’t begin with a product idea. It began with a slow accumulation of skills, values, questions, and fatigue.

For years, I worked the kind of hours that are normalised in film and television but rarely sustainable long-term. Sixty-hour weeks were common. Fifty or more of those hours were spent helping create stories for other people, often on large-scale productions, while another ten or more were reserved for my own film projects, usually late at night or on weekends.

There were extraordinary moments in that time. Working on films like Disney’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, or television shows such as Stan’s Prosper meant collaborating with highly skilled teams, learning at an immense scale, and contributing to stories that reached millions. I’m deeply grateful for those experiences and more.

Unfortunately, there were also projects where my values didn’t align. Not with the story being told, and not with how the work was structured. Gender imbalance, hiring practices, and the quiet expectation that passion should override wellbeing began to wear thin. I was productive, but not always present. Fulfilled in flashes, but not in a way that felt durable long-term.

What sustained me through that period wasn’t the pace. It was making.

Discovering Form

Before film, before business, before higher education, I was always drawn to form.

The first taste of this that I can clearly recall came through film, specifically the work of Stuart Craig in the Harry Potter films. I grew up immersed in the descriptions found in the books, but when it came time to seeing the imagined worlds translated into physical forms shifted something in me. The introduction to the production design in the first Harry Potter film, with its moving staircases, the Great Hall with its floating candles, and Diagon Alley with its wonky buildings, are all places that feel both fantastical and yet structurally believable. Film two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, cemented it for me. The Burrow, with its stacked, precarious logic and lived-in chaos, felt like architectural genius for the characters who live there. By the time Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part Two was released, I was in my final year of high school. A group of friends and I travelled to Adelaide, started a full series marathon before dawn, watched every film back-to-back, and then drove to the midnight release of the final Harry Potter chapter. It was more than fandom. It was an early recognition of how environments shape character, emotion, narrative, and memory. That series made my decision easy. It led me directly to pursue a Bachelor of Interior Architecture.

Studying a Bachelor of Interior Architecture at University of South Australia (now Adelaide University) taught me how to think spatially and experimentally. We cut, layered, and assembled materials to discover shape. Form wasn’t something you decided in advance. It was something you uncovered through the process of design thinking and exploration. That way of thinking has stayed with me.

That foundation in Interior Architecture led me to apply for a Bachelor of Design at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) in Sydney, where I could pursue a more explicitly creative career across film, theatre, and events. While interior architecture and decoration remain personal passions, designing for film felt more aligned with how I wanted to work. Film allows you to design without temporal limits. You can work in the past, the present, or an imagined future, and create environments that serve narrative as much as function. It was a pivotal shift that allowed my architectural thinking to move beyond static spaces and into storytelling through environment.

In the early years after university, alongside film work, I found part-time employment in a moulding and casting studio in Sydney. When my boss realised I could sculpt, we began taking on jobs that allowed me to hone that skill. I worked on objects at wildly different scales, from small Christmas ornaments for a Westfield commercial, to large sculptural elements like Nickelodeon’s iconic slime bucket, or moulding Alien: Covenant hieroglyphic vessels. This work also gave me the knowledge to mould and cast my own projects.

At the same time, I was sculpting, moulding and casting for stop-motion animation. I was creating miniatures, puppets, and fine details where precision and patience mattered. Stop-motion teaches you restraint on many levels. You learn to work slowly, to respect material limits, and to accept that progress is often slow, but rewarding.

Across architecture, film, and sculpture, one thing became clear. I was a formist long before I had language for it.

Reclaiming Time for My Own Work

Like many creatives, I live/d with a backlog of unfinished projects. Ideas arrived faster than my schedule allowed. My days were fragmented across roles and deadlines. I loved what I did, but the constant output made it difficult to bring my own work to completion.

Creating a business of my own wasn’t about escaping my previous film work. It is to create the freedom to be more selective about what film projects I say yes to or create for myself. And I am under no illusion that starting my own business will take as many, if not more hours than I had dedicated to film. It is about choosing where my energy goes, expanding my creativity outside of film, and choosing what stories I wish to share with the world, on my own schedule. 

I’d had a taste of entrepreneurship through co-founding Aracourt Studio with my best friend and fellow design graduate Ara Nuri Steel. While we collaborate on select projects for Aracourt, I knew I wanted to also build something solo. Something outside the film production cycle, something that would allow me to choose my output so that I had time and energy to finish my personal projects. Something that used the skills I’d accumulated over my lifetime.

Finding My Flow State

In 2019, I returned to pottery classes. Sculpting with clay reminded me of a particular state of flow I had only felt in small doses over the years. Hours would pass without noticing. My nervous system softened. The outcome was tangible. 

Seeing an object come into being through your own hands is deeply rewarding. I began to recognise how rare that feeling had become while working primarily on others’ projects.

During 2023 and 2024, while freelancing in film and completing my short film If/When, I also took on casual work at a Sydney-based candle studio. The flexibility supported my filmmaking schedule, but more importantly, it gave me a clear view of the day-to-day realities of a product-based business.

Around the same time, I completed a Certificate IV in Entrepreneurship and New Business, and for the first time, everything connected. Design. Making. Business. Values. Pace. I wrote a business plan to organise my thoughts and test whether this idea could hold. It could.

Where It Became Real

In the lead-up to Christmas 2024, I created my first three candle designs. A tree, a pinecone, and a star. They were designed to be unscented. I’m sensitive to synthetic fragrances and prone to headaches, and I wanted to create objects that didn’t demand sensory compromise. Candles that could be used safely, intentionally, or simply enjoyed as form.

The pinecone was the most difficult, and the most meaningful. My family’s farm has been in our care for six generations. Rows of pine trees line the horizon, a visual marker that signals we’re nearly home after trips away. I wanted that feeling on my Christmas table surrounded by family. Sculptural pinecone candles interwoven with real pine clippings.

Technically, it was a challenge. I create separate moulds for each colour to avoid pigment transfer, which meant repeatedly removing, repairing, and refining the sculpture for each mould. Pinecones don’t forgive shortcuts. Every extruded pinecone scale that broke off inside the mould had to be reattached or re-sculpted.

It was slow, fiddly, time-consuming, and exactly how I wanted to work.

Output With Intention

The Messy Formist emerged not as a rejection of my film work, but as a reorientation of focus alongside it.

It allows me to control my output, work with intention, and to bring my own creative projects to completion. To create objects that genuinely earn their place in our spaces through use.

Hand-sculpted functional forms became my medium because it sits at a rare intersection. Sculptural, functional, temporal. Objects designed to be used.

This journal exists to make the process visible. The thinking, the testing, the decisions behind each object. It’s a space to talk about form, function, and focus. If you’ve found your way here, you’re likely navigating similar tensions. Wanting calm without performance. Beauty without excess. Objects that help rather than distract.

You don’t need fewer things.
You need the right things.

That’s why I started The Messy Formist.