Hello!
We are Thea and Graham and we created Ayane to give ourselves a place where our imaginations can have free rein and we can indulge in our love of music, fantasy and fairy tales.
In essence Ayane is a creative studio; somewhere that we can create, explore and share our own fairy tales and the magical worlds they are set in.
Our projects weave together music, illustration, animation, photography, words and so much more. Housed within our ‘Imaginarium’ each project has its own dedicated journal where you can follow our progress and adventures as we create. You can also find these journals on our YouTube channel.
We really hope you enjoy the content we create and that it inspires you to give your imagination a little more freedom to play.
As you are here in on our ‘about’ page, you are probably curious to know more about us and Ayane. So grab a cup of tea and when you're sitting comfortably, we'll begin...
tHE STORY BEGINS
The story of Ayane begins one cold Sunday morning in late November 2015 when I woke up with the thought 'I want to learn the harp’ echoing in my mind… as you do!
Music has always been really important to me and an inextricable part of who I am. Throughout my childhood I was a member of several ensembles, orchestras and choirs, as a flautist and soprano respectively. However after I graduated from university the long hours my career demanded left me with little time to dedicate to music and creative pursuits.
The desire to start learning the harp was not new, it was actually something I had wanted to do for a really long time. But what was new was the fact that it was now accompanied by a strong tug like feeling of ‘I need to do this’. I have never experienced anything like it before, but I decided to make time to follow it and see where it led me.
I fell in love with the harp from the moment I played my first notes. Three years later after many, many hours of practice and studying theory, that tug led me to the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.
Encouraged by my endeavours, Graham rediscovered his love for the piano and began to play regularly again. He had performed and taken part in competitions as a child, but like me the pressures of his university studies and career had meant that his piano had been left to gather dust for a time. He also became a very willing study partner during my time at Trinity, so together we worked hard to further our knowledge of music theory, composition and history.
Ballet & Fairy Tales
While I was at Trinity I found that I really enjoyed writing music that told the story of an imagined scene or happening. This discovery allowed me to revel in my love of cinematic music, fairy tales and fantasy literature.
As the daughter of a classically trained ballerina and a keen dancer myself, I grew up surrounded by the beautiful music from ballet scores and the fairy tales behind them. While I’ve never been more than an amateur, I have danced on stage a fair amount and also choreographed many dances over the years. The combination of music, fairy tales and ballet steps is a magical one to me; whenever I dance the music and magic seemingly become almost tangible and it makes me feel alive and free.
So I guess it’s not really surprising that a little while later I found myself writing pieces of music inspired by my favourite fairy tales, ballet scores and film scores. Over time these pieces continued to evolve and before I knew it, I had started writing short ballets based on my own fairy tales.
The first of which being ‘The Nymphs of Spring’. This ballet and its fairy tale grew organically out of an idea Graham and I had to write a piece of music inspired by everything we love about Spring. We began the project with the intention of writing a cinematic orchestral piece depicting an enchanted forest scene waking from its winter slumber.
Within a couple of weeks we had written a short piece, one that we were really happy with as it seemed to describe the scene we had envisioned really well, but we both had this feeling that the piece wanted to be something much more. With the luxury of time on our side during lockdown we decided to keep exploring the world we had created to try and figure out what the rest of the story was, so we headed to our bookshelves in search of inspiration and quickly got lost down a rabbit hole of research.
Over the next couple of months we crafted the framework of our story and we began using it to help us write some more of our piece. Each time we listened back to what we had written, the imagery and the story behind the piece became more and more clear until I found myself getting up and stepping through the story. A little while later I realised that my feet were making some of the well-drilled patterns from my many years of ballet training.
Suddenly the ideas for both the music and the story started flowing like a spring waterfall and it became clear that our little spring piece wanted to be a piece of ballet music and part of something much bigger.
‘The Nymphs of Spring’ soon became a complex, vibrant and vivid world that is on a completely different scale to anything we’ve ever done before. The story framework expanded to become a novel framework, ideas for artwork, design projects and more music.
This is how Ayane came to be; it grew out of our spring piece and all the ideas it inspired.
Art, Design & Photography
If you had asked me the question ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ before I was twelve the answer you would have got was ‘a Disney animator’. I was totally obsessed with everything about their animated films as a child; the music, the art and of course the stories. I drew sketchbooks full of scenes from my favourite films and also rendered the view outside my bedroom window into magical worlds.
I was very lucky to have incredible art teachers and arty friends at senior school who encouraged me to explore and play with my ideas in lots of different media and also to research the work of other artists. I loved the way we would create and evolve projects together and grow them into really multifaceted and considered bodies of work. This way of working has been and continues to be the foundation for all my creative endeavours.
While I did create a short animated film in my final year, I didn’t study art beyond school. However I did continue drawing, painting and photography as hobbies when time and life allowed. Many moons ago, missing a creative outlet, I created a jewellery brand (as a side hustle) and I went on to win several major awards with my designs. The pieces I designed were inspired by my love of nature and the natural world, each one had a story behind it that referenced ancient symbolism and folklore. Sustainability and conservation were at the core of the brand from day one as I wanted to do everything in my power to protect the beauty of the natural world.
As each of our Imaginarium projects exist in their own magical world, they give me an amazing opportunity to really lean into the style of art I love to create; from concept sketches of our characters and their costumes to landscape and nature photography to provide inspiration for paintings, animation and digital art of the worlds our stories are set in. Our projects also afford me the freedom to design and create the jewellery and artefacts which are key to each of our fairy tales. The possibilities are endless, which is so incredibly exciting.
AYAnE
We chose to name our creative studio Ayane (pronounced ‘eye - anne - knee’ if you’re wondering!) because it means ‘colourful sound’ in Japanese and our choice of a hummingbird for our logo is because they symbolise joy and playfulness. We designed the shape of her wings to have echoes of the strings of a harp and the profile of its harmonic curve.
We really hope that you enjoy following our adventures as we learn, grow and create.
Thea and Graham ✨