It's only natural

Striking the perfect balance between beautiful and useful, Arcana's heirloom textiles are designed to deepen our connection with Nature, finds Julie Harding

- Julie Harding

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WHEN most of Ria Mishaal's contemporaries were tuning in to the likes of The Office and Little Britain for entertainment in the early 2000s, to her, the notion of top-class television viewing came courtesy of Sir David Attenborough waxing lyrical about the natural world on The Blue Planet and Life in the Undergrowth. However, whereas Sir David's passion for all things flora and fauna has played out to the entire nation over decades, hers has gone under the radar until now.

By the time Covid hit and the UK population was instructed to stay indoors, Dr Mishaal, who has a PhD in behavioural neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, was suffering from burnout after 14 creative, but pressurised years working as a wedding photographer. Craving a new direction, she pondered on her love of art from school days and also the words of William Morris: 'Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.'

'I thought, why can't objects be both useful and beautiful?' Dr Mishaal recalls. Just as a chrysalis morphs into a butterfly, her musings soon turned into a beguiling heirloom-textiles brand, Arcana, offering woven cotton blankets depicting her own drawings of the natural world.