Before the collection, there was a woman in a garden.
Lady in Wisteria began the way everything in this atelier begins, as a drawing. A single figure, dressed in her finest, walking beneath wisteria with nowhere she needed to be. I built her up slowly on canvas in acrylic and Japanese ink: the ink carrying my black line, the acrylic carrying the colour, layer over layer, until the stillness I had imagined was actually there in front of me.
She is one of one. At 91.4 by 121.9 centimetres she is the largest work in the house, painted in 2026 and signed - there will never be another.
What makes her the muse of A Pause in Bloom is what happened next. The wisteria that wreathes her shoulders was redrawn, bloom by bloom, into the textile prints of the collection. The lorikeets that flutter close to her light flew out of the painting and into
Golden Hour Birdsong, Piece No. 01. If you own a dress from this collection, you are wearing her garden.
This is the order of things at Abigail Jane, and it will be the order of every collection to come: first the painting, then the prints, then the pieces. One original at the apex. Fifty signed and numbered prints, so the image can live on more walls than one. And the numbered dresses, which carry the artwork out into the world - to lunches and galleries and long afternoons - the way no canvas ever could.
She hangs in the atelier for now, watching the collection she started being cut and sewn beneath her. One day she will belong to a single collector. Until then, she supervises.