Every label has a beginning. Mine is a cove where the desert walks straight into the sea.
Hearsons Cove is iron-ore country, in the far north-west of Western Australia. The rocks there aren’t brown, and they aren’t grey, they are red. A deep, rusted, ancient red that holds the heat of the day long after the sun has let it go. And the water they meet is the opposite of everything around it: a clear, improbable turquoise that looks borrowed from another country entirely.
I stood there with my camera and understood something I have never unlearned: nature does not match its colours politely. It places the boldest things side by side and lets them speak. Red against turquoise.
That conversation became my palette.
Every print I have drawn since carries the lesson of that cove. Colour combinations you wouldn’t dare put together until you’ve seen the Pilbara do it first, held in place by the black line of my pen. When people ask why my work is so unapologetic about colour, the honest answer is that I’m not the brave one. The landscape is. I just draw what it says.
The colours of Hearsons Cove, that iron red, that turquoise - are kept for the garments themselves. They never appear in our packaging or our marks; black and gold belong to the house, and the cove belongs to the cloth. It felt right that the wildest colours should only ever be worn.
I have lived in Sydney, the Northern Territory, Western Australia and now the Sunshine Coast, and the truth is the whole country draws through me. But if you want to know where Abigail Jane truly began, it’s standing on red rock at the edge of turquoise water, a long way from anywhere, deciding that one day I would find a way to wear it.