Somary began her career training as an armorer, restoring historic weapons, sometimes altering their design for use on film sets or for private collectors. This was a hands-on practice, rooting through antique decorative pommels and reinterpreting them at the workbench, sometimes infusing them with elements of fantasy.

“I’ve always had an interest in history, anthropology and archaeology - subjects that, frankly, conflict with my cloudy memory. It makes for vague and sometimes muddled impressions of places lost, long dead languages, discarded objects resurfacing, crumbling ruins of once grand cities. They all conflate and split, blend and disperse, and my dreams are filled with these wonderful, often enlightening mis-remembered historical inaccuracies.”

This body of work reclaims that potential curse as a gift - allowing the hazy and indistinct recall to influence the design approach. Rather than referencing images, Somary refers instead to her own veiled memories of objects and stories and scale in a great internal unearthing. The result is a collection both machined and hand worked, nothing quite true to place or period but nonetheless familiar.

I guess it had been ten years or so… Ten years of staring at that spot in the garden where the wood pigeons always stood and cooed into the damp air every morning at seven, the earth solid with frost. That patch of earth bothered me often, it was so frigid and hostile, not a thing would grow on it besides a stubborn dandelion weed or the unfussy moss.

Those pigeons were as obsessed with that spot as I was, pecking hopefully, their endless coos pleading with me to pull out my shovel and tear up the soil, until I couldn’t take their unblinking stares any longer...

Dig dig dig. I dug the earth up. Hitting layers of sand and muck and worms, coins and lost keys, my hands sore from the work. Hours passed, or was it minutes, I didn’t check my phone, and barely remembered to take a breath. Something was pulling me, tiny silver strands trickling from above and below, pulling at my boots and skin and hair. A flooding sensation rose from deep within my hands, past the blisters, into the earth and back again. Until the brightest column of white light cracked my chest and the earth wide open, flowing endlessly, pushing me hard into the air and pulling me back down, as if the earth itself wanted to drag me into its bowels and then throw me right off. I was tethered to everything - centuries of hope and possibility and loss and feeling, no time to stretch things into a chronology.

The pigeons watched on, also glowing with the bright white light, their cooing turning to whispers, telling me all of the things that had happened on that spot before, and all the things that had never happened but were said to have. The secretive earth had let me in, her unending present gaping for a moment to let me look behind at what maybe never was but now is.

-Georgia Somary, 2025 journal excerpt