The more time I spend looking at historical objects, landscapes and architecture, the less interested I become in the idea of inspiration as something primarily visual.
It is easy to collect images. A beautiful ancient vessel, a stone wall, a fragment of decoration, an archaeological object or the profile of an amphora can quickly become a reference. We can borrow its colours, proportions or patterns and create something that carries an immediate association with the past. But I am increasingly interested in a different question. What is actually worth carrying forward?
Not which ancient form should become a contemporary vase, or which decorative motif could appear on a new plate. The more interesting question is what these objects can teach us about making, using materials, living with things and allowing ideas to evolve over time. Heritage, for me, becomes much more valuable when it is understood as knowledge rather than style.
Looking beyond the image
When we encounter historical objects in museums, we see them in a very particular condition. They have been removed from everyday life, cleaned, catalogued, illuminated and separated from us by glass. Their original context has largely disappeared. A cup is no longer being held. A plate is no longer carrying food. An amphora is no longer travelling between places. A small vessel that once contained something ordinary can become an object of extraordinary cultural value simply because it survived.
It is easy, in this setting, to see only the image. But these objects were designed to participate in life. They had weight, purpose, cost and material limitations. They were carried, filled, emptied, stacked, traded, repaired and eventually discarded or lost. They existed among other objects and within particular rituals. Understanding them as design means trying to recover some of that ordinary intelligence.
What survives is not necessarily the object
A particular vessel may belong completely to its time, while the thinking behind it can remain relevant. A handle tells us about the relationship between an object and a hand. A foot tells us something about stability and the way an object meets a surface. A repeated typology shows how makers worked within a shared language without necessarily producing identical results. Decoration reveals how an image can respond to curvature rather than simply being placed upon it.
None of these lessons require us to reproduce the historical object. In fact, reproduction may sometimes be the least interesting response. What can survive instead is a principle. An understanding of proportion. Respect for material. Economy of means. A relationship between beauty and usefulness. The freedom to introduce humour. The confidence to decorate. The ability to repeat an idea while allowing difference. These are much more open-ended inheritances. They allow something genuinely new to happen.
Landscape carries knowledge in the same way
I think about landscape similarly. A Mediterranean dry-stone wall is visually beautiful, but its importance does not lie only in its appearance. It contains knowledge about available material, slope, drainage, cultivation, labour and climate. A shaded courtyard is not valuable simply because we associate it with Mediterranean architecture. Its proportions, orientation, vegetation and material surfaces create a particular microclimate. A terrace follows topography because somebody understood the ground. An olive grove has spacing because trees need soil, light, water and access.
Once these things are reduced to an aesthetic, much of their intelligence disappears. A stone wall becomes cladding. A pergola becomes an image. A landscape becomes a palette of beige, green and blue. This is exactly what I want to avoid in Me Meraki. The Mediterranean should not become a style applied to an object. It should remain a source of questions.
Heritage without nostalgia
Working from Greek material culture inevitably brings the question of identity into the work. There is an enormous visual archive available: amphorae, geometric patterns, black-figure ceramics, architectural fragments, mosaics, sculpture and countless recognisable symbols. It would be easy to build a contemporary ceramic language from those images. But recognition alone does not create a meaningful relationship with heritage.
I am much more interested in something quieter. How did people make families of objects before identical industrial production? How did form respond to use? How did decoration interact with geometry? Why did certain proportions persist? How much individuality could exist within an established typology? Why were useful objects allowed to be funny, strange or richly decorated?
These questions make history active. They allow us to disagree with it, transform it and continue it. Heritage then becomes a conversation rather than an instruction.
Carrying forward the attitude of the maker
Perhaps one of the things I most want to carry forward is not a particular design principle at all. It is the attitude of making. Looking at groups of ancient ceramics, particularly the many small vessels I encountered in Rhodes, there is an extraordinary sense of continuity and individuality existing at the same time.
Someone knew how a particular type of vessel was normally made. Then they made their version. Perhaps the neck became slightly longer. Perhaps the body became heavier. Perhaps the decoration changed. Perhaps the hand simply moved differently that day. The maker was part of a tradition without disappearing inside it. I find this very beautiful. It suggests that continuity does not require obedience. A language survives precisely because people continue speaking it differently.
What should we leave behind?
Carrying something forward also requires deciding what not to carry. Tradition should not be protected from questioning simply because it is tradition. Historical forms emerged from particular societies, technologies, resources and ways of living. Our conditions are different. We have different tables. Different kitchens. Different production methods. Different relationships with objects. Different environmental responsibilities. Different possibilities.
The purpose of looking backwards cannot be to pretend those differences do not exist. A contemporary object should belong to contemporary life. The challenge is therefore not to preserve a form unchanged, but to understand what within it remains intelligent enough to continue.
A living archive
I like thinking of history as an archive that remains unfinished. Every generation adds something. Some ideas disappear. Others return unexpectedly. A form can remain dormant for centuries and suddenly become relevant again. A familiar typology can encounter a new material. An old principle can solve a contemporary problem. Something once considered ordinary can become extraordinary when seen from another time.
This makes research feel much less like looking backwards. It becomes part of designing forwards. For Me Meraki, ancient Greek ceramics, Mediterranean landscapes and architectural traditions are increasingly becoming part of this larger archive. They sit alongside contemporary design, landscape architecture, material experiments, mistakes in the studio and the experience of using objects every day. None needs to provide a complete answer. Together, they create a field from which new work can emerge.
Continuing rather than copying
Perhaps this is the distinction I want to protect most as the practice develops. I am not interested in making objects that look historical. I am interested in understanding why some historical objects continue to feel relevant. I don’t want to reproduce Mediterranean landscapes through colour and texture. I want to understand the environmental and spatial intelligence that produced them. And I don’t want craft to become an argument against contemporary production or technology. I want to understand what the hand contributes that might otherwise disappear.
To carry something forward is not to preserve it unchanged. It is to decide what remains valuable, allow it to encounter the present, and accept that it may become something completely different. That transformation is not a loss of tradition. Perhaps it is exactly how traditions remain alive.
What comes next
These questions are beginning to change the way I think about the next Me Meraki objects. I want to work more deliberately with typology and proportion. I want to investigate tableware as families of objects rather than isolated pieces. I want to allow more character and perhaps more decoration into a practice that has so far tended towards restraint. I want to continue looking at landscape not for colours to reproduce, but for systems, relationships and material intelligence.
I also want to leave enough space for things I have not yet encountered. Because research should not lead to a fixed vocabulary. It should make the vocabulary larger. The purpose of looking at what came before is not to decide what the future should look like. It is to understand more deeply what is possible. And then to begin making again.