Endings are productive in ways that are hard to admit at the time.
When something stops, a relationship, a chapter, a version of yourself you’d been holding onto, there’s a period where everything feels unresolved. Nothing fits the way it did. The space that’s left is uncomfortable and specific and hard to describe to anyone who isn’t inside it.
That discomfort is material.
Not immediately. The first days are just noise. But somewhere in the weeks that follow, things start to take shape. Images, words, associations that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. A vocabulary that only becomes available after something has ended.
Some of the most precise work comes from that place. Precise because the feeling is so specific. There’s no vagueness in grief or relief or the particular exhaustion that follows a long ending. It knows exactly what it is. And that exactness tends to produce things that other people recognise, not because they’ve lived the same story, but because the emotion underneath it is one they know.
That’s the strange thing about making something from an ending. It starts completely personal and arrives somewhere universal. The more specific the feeling, the more people seem to find themselves in it.
Which is, in the end, the whole point.
— Studio Ninette, designed in Belgium.