CREATIVE FORCE
A lifelong love of craft led Brydie Stewart to start her own business in her home at Kiama as well as teaching others the art of knotting.
LATE AT NIGHT, while the coastal town of Kiama sleeps, Brydie Stewart is in her studio, immersed in a weaving made of unbleached linen. With absolute concentration and fast-moving fingers, she deftly knots diamonds and intricate geometric patterns, taking cues from the natural shapes and colours of the seascape and surrounding bushland of the NSW South Coast. “I get lost in it; the rhythmic method of allowing myself the time to get deep within my work,” Brydie explains. “There’s nothing else quite like it.” Sold through her business Mary Maker Studio (Mary being a beloved family name), Brydie’s macramé has developed a faithful following around Australia and overseas. Her distinctive woven wall-hangings — often featuring five to six kilograms of fringing alone — are so popular that items listed on her website sell out in minutes. But it’s the artistic process and her ability to share the textural pleasure of knotted fibres, as opposed to the potential to turn a profit, that motivates this maker. “I like the raw materials to shine and I want people to reach out and touch them. It’s a sensory experience,” she says. Originally from Falls Creek, just west of Jervis Bay in NSW, Brydie, 36, and her husband Joel, 39, an architectural builder, have lived in Kiama for eight years and have two young daughters, five-year-old Lola and Ivory, aged two. She began the “weird knotting thing”, as her friends described it, back at university where she studied fine arts and, later, a Masters of Education. She then spent the next 14 years as a high school teacher, encouraging others to explore their creativity and pursue the arts. However, when Brydie was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a week before she and Joel were married in 2013, it provided the impetus for her to commit to her own creative career. “I remember the moment of realising I’d given so much to enable everyone else to shine, but what did I really want to do? I made a promise to myself to see where I could take this.” It was while Brydie was on maternity leave with Lola in 2014 that she began holding macramé workshops, after realising she missed teaching and the connection with students. Word spread and she has since taught more than 1000 people from her studio in Kiama, as well as online. >