Mind Vacation № 18: Friend of Jenny Pennywood: Audrey McGee

Hi, Hello! Happy August!

I’m so happy to be here with a new Mind Vacation!

Last year Jenny Pennywood was tagged on Instagram in a soulful photo of our Everywhere Square. The simple lighting and styling evoked a mood that resonated deeply with me. Fast forward a year, and I received an exciting invitation from the person who tagged me, LA-based photographer and creative director Audrey McGee. Audrey planned a trip to Italy and France, bringing together brands to create and collaborate on deeper storytelling around their products.

I had the perfect product for Audrey to take the adventure: the Market Bag. It's a new product I'm experimenting with, and while I'm not sure if I will make it again, it felt perfect for the adventure. As we begin the journey towards the end of the season please enjoy these gorgeous photos filled with summer poetry and learn a little about Audrey and her work.

XO, JEN

PS - I can’t wait to work with Audrey again!

Talk about how you flipped work with play a few years ago and this is the place you want to live from - I can’t remember exactly what you said but you had a philosophy and I found it interesting and in line with the Jenny Pennywood mentality. 

Sharing in acknowledgment that when isolation began for COVID it was many things for many people. For myself, it was one of my most favorite, beautiful, and seminal times in life. As cosmic winks go, isolation aligned with other major life lessons I was metabolizing at the time. And it paved way for a lot of room to repaint myself. Brevity is typically not my default but the round up version is that I made the decision to not take any projects/clients for an unset amount of time to reinvent ‘play’. After seven months of juicy excavation, origin stories of the word ‘work’ - its lineage, my lineage with it, the world’s, our culture’s, I decided to molt it from my life and choose play in its place. 

There are many bones to this making, I drew a lot of inspiration from ikigai, the focus on our inner selves and how we can learn to intersect it with being in service to the world and in peace with ourselves. It completely rewrote how I approach and look at creating income. It illuminated so many areas I hadn’t been taught to connect. Suffice to say, play, while always a living thing to tend to, has become a source that uplifts my life in place of draining it. Where it was a corner of life that I would lay down boundaries, sacrifice my energy, even health at times, it’s grown to become a wellspring that feeds these areas. It's no longer work.

What is your favorite color? Why? 

I love them too much to exclude any. Often the way a few of them unintentionally come together in front of me at any given moment. Not just in nature. A patina wall with weathered flyers, flowers - regularly, and light. The infinite conversations light makes with anything it touches. How I feel observing them, or the way they inspire me to a photograph, feels sacred and I love leaving that channel wordless. If you’ve seen one of Sanzo Wada’s Dictionary of Color Combinations - those. All of those are my favorite.

What are you up to right now? Are any projects exciting to you right now?

Very much and many. There’s a project ’ve been nesting and am so excited to share with the world soon called Loci Rue. It’s my life’s ikigai. Pardon the tease, planning to announce on my insta this year.

Talk a little bit about your trip why you wanted to do the trip and what were your favorite parts about it. 

I usually do one partnership journey a year (this year I’ll be doing two, the next one is through coastal Maine in early September) and decided to add on Europe when a friend invited me to go. France was the easiest yes, it has felt like home from my first visit there and I haven’t been back since I lived in Paris 10 years ago. We were visiting three cities throughout the south, pockets I have never been to, and we were still deciding on an island chapter for our trip. We looked at Greece, Spain, France and Italy and I kept telling my friend there’s this island that embodies the exact feel of where I’d love us to go. I couldn’t remember the island’s name and kept referring to the movie it was in, ‘A Bigger Splash’, one of my faves and a modern take on Jane Birkin’s ‘La Piscine’. My friend had found Pantelleria on her own and when I finally referred to a buried spreadsheet where I wrote my finding notes from the movie, we realized it was the same island.

Favorite city you visited during your trip/favorite/favorite beach … just something that you are still pining over. 

I prefer not isolating with favorites, I would recommend every stop for different reasons. When I think of the journey, the two places that bubble to the surface first are Marseille and Pantelleria. It’s so easy for me to feel romantic about Marseille, I read such a poetic piece on Marseille before heading there that paints it so well, “I travel to this city for its refusal to be glamorous despite its beauty. If Marseille lost its grime, it would lose its soul, and though the city is old, it isn’t a museum. Its history is alive and layered.

Pantelleria has irrevocably become a special place to me. Mainly because of the dammuso we stayed in (dammusos are the native homes there fashioned out of lava rocks, the halfway between Sicily and Tunisia island is an extinct volcano). It sat at perfect height overlooking the sea. It was isolated enough to be free of noise pollution and still hear the surf through an open window. And that rooftop… The kind you want to keep secret and bring all of your dearest people to at the same time.