ManuelaMenziStudio_Postcard_Aurum.jpg
ManuelaMenziStudio_Postcard_Aurum.jpg

POSTCARD "AURUM"

CHF 5.00

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She is your father's aunt. The room at the top of the house is the study, to everyone but her. She calls it her archive.

There is a desk in it, somewhere under all of it: unopened post, love letters, a magnifying glass, a saucer holding paperclips and four gemstones. A jar is full to the brim with brushes and propelling pencils and fountain pens, and a nib she has not found ink for in years. The shelving she found at a flea market in Saint-Ouen and brought home somehow. It runs to the ceiling on three walls. Nothing on it is arranged. Everything on it has been put somewhere on purpose.

High on the shelf, in a gold surround, a painting of an eye.

Georgians called them lover's eyes. When you could not be seen with someone, you wore a miniature of their eye instead, painted on ivory and set in gold. A whole face names the person. One eye names nobody. The Prince of Wales sent the first one in 1785, to a woman he was not allowed to marry. They worked so well that almost none of the surviving eyes can be matched to a face.

Below the painting, brass weights in a stepped row, from the ounce down to the one you could lose in a carpet. A sheet of mica she splits with a thumbnail, to show you how a thing can come apart in layers and lose nothing. Decanters, stoppers long gone. Two conch shells, chalky as bone. A marble head, nose chipped. An oil painting of a dog, from another flea market and not her dog, though she talks about him as if he were. Quinces in a bowl, furring over, scenting the whole floor.

Then the boxes. Patterned shoeboxes in every colour, a biscuit tin, a wooden crate that still smells of camphor, all labelled in her hand and none of the labels true. Letters bundled by decade, string cutting into the paper. Stickers gone tacky at the corners. Ribbon wound back on itself, silk, grosgrain and satin and one length she has been saving since before your father was born.

So we built the card the way the archive is built. Everything she loves, all at once, every one of them kept for a reason she can still tell you.

PAY WITH TWINT

She is your father's aunt. The room at the top of the house is the study, to everyone but her. She calls it her archive.

There is a desk in it, somewhere under all of it: unopened post, love letters, a magnifying glass, a saucer holding paperclips and four gemstones. A jar is full to the brim with brushes and propelling pencils and fountain pens, and a nib she has not found ink for in years. The shelving she found at a flea market in Saint-Ouen and brought home somehow. It runs to the ceiling on three walls. Nothing on it is arranged. Everything on it has been put somewhere on purpose.

High on the shelf, in a gold surround, a painting of an eye.

Georgians called them lover's eyes. When you could not be seen with someone, you wore a miniature of their eye instead, painted on ivory and set in gold. A whole face names the person. One eye names nobody. The Prince of Wales sent the first one in 1785, to a woman he was not allowed to marry. They worked so well that almost none of the surviving eyes can be matched to a face.

Below the painting, brass weights in a stepped row, from the ounce down to the one you could lose in a carpet. A sheet of mica she splits with a thumbnail, to show you how a thing can come apart in layers and lose nothing. Decanters, stoppers long gone. Two conch shells, chalky as bone. A marble head, nose chipped. An oil painting of a dog, from another flea market and not her dog, though she talks about him as if he were. Quinces in a bowl, furring over, scenting the whole floor.

Then the boxes. Patterned shoeboxes in every colour, a biscuit tin, a wooden crate that still smells of camphor, all labelled in her hand and none of the labels true. Letters bundled by decade, string cutting into the paper. Stickers gone tacky at the corners. Ribbon wound back on itself, silk, grosgrain and satin and one length she has been saving since before your father was born.

So we built the card the way the archive is built. Everything she loves, all at once, every one of them kept for a reason she can still tell you.

DETAILS

SIZE

A6 10.5 x 14.8 cm

BACKSIDE

Blank for your message

Soft and uncoated, that welcomes ink and holds it well

PAPER

MADE IN

The UK

  • FREE WORLDWIDE SHIPPING ON ALL ORDERS

    Orders are usually shipped within 2–3 working days, and international shipping is available.

    Please note that customers may be subject to customs duties in their respective countries, which are their responsibility.

    You can also pay directly via TWINT.

    You’re also welcome to pick up your order directly from the studio in Meilen. Important: Please call or text ahead to arrange a pickup time. This ensures I’m at the studio and have your order prepared.

  • Handle with clean, dry hands to keep the print looking its best. Store flat in a drawer. Keep away from direct sunlight to preserve the colours over time.

    Read more here

WRAPPING PAPER WRAPPING PAPER
WRAPPING PAPER "A CROWN IN THE STORM"
CHF 30.00

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When Mausolus of Caria died in 350 BC, his wife Artemisia II did not simply mourn him. After his cremation, she mixed his ashes into her daily drinks, making herself into a living tomb, carrying him inside her as she carried on ruling. And rule she did, under enormous pressure. Cities and islands across her domain refused to accept a female successor and revolted. Artemisia wore a crown in the storm, drawing on strategic brilliance to suppress the uprisings and hold her power together until her own death two years later.

The widow's extraordinary grief and turbulent reign have inspired artists for centuries. At the heart of the wrapping paper collage "A Crown in the Storm" is Guido Reni's "Portrait of a Woman" (1638-1639), a Baroque masterpiece depicting Artemisia in a turban, cradling a Lapis Lazuli bowl containing her husband's remains. Her gaze tilts upward, torn between devotion and anguish, and it sets the emotional tone for the entire composition. Around her, further fragments of Baroque portraiture deepen the drama, while glimpses of Paul Sandby's "The River Severn at Shrewsbury" (1770) introduce a sense of turbulent, flowing time. Botanical elements, geometric shapes and layered textures complete the collage, echoing the tension between order and grief that defined Artemisia's reign.

Printed on premium paper designed to survive the unwrapping and be kept, "A Crown in the Storm" gives your gift two layers: what is inside, and the story wrapped around it.Because the way you wrap something says as much as what is inside.

PAIRS WELL WITH

WRAPPING PAPER WRAPPING PAPER
WRAPPING PAPER "A VISIT TO MR. BERGMANNS FLOWERSHOP"
CHF 30.00

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Mr. Bergmann’s flower shop sits in the old town of Zurich, in a street that has seen several centuries pass without too much fuss. We don't know exactly how long he has been there. We like to think long enough that the city has simply grown around him.

Inside, it is darker than you expect. Light comes in from the street in long narrow strips, catching the dust and the pollen and the dried petals suspended in the air. Your eyes adjust slowly, and as they do, the shop reveals itself in layers.

The first thing you notice is the smell. Something green and earthy underneath, then something sweeter on top. Fresh dahlias, their heads heavy and elaborate, in deep burgundy and burnt orange. Then something drier, older. Lavender, perhaps, or chamomile. The kind of smell that makes you think of remedy.

Which makes sense. For most of human history, a shop like this would have been a pharmacy. The flowers and plants that now sit in vases were once kept in labelled jars, weighed out carefully, prescribed. Calendula for skin. Chamomile for sleep. Hydrangea root for the kidneys. The line between a flower shop and an apothecary was, for a very long time, not a line at all.

Mr. Bergmann seems to know this, even if he has never said so. His shelves hold more than flowers. Wide-mouthed ceramic ones in earthy greens, tall glass ones with dried grasses spilling over the edges, small terracotta pots with single stems.Leatherbound books stacked on the floor beside them, their spines unreadable. Used candles burnt down to their last centimetre. Dried fruits. A sculpture or two, origin unknown.

We wonder what he thinks about when he arranges things. Whether he considers the dried and the fresh, the living and the preserved, the ancient and the newly cut, as different things at all.

WRAPPING PAPER WRAPPING PAPER
WRAPPING PAPER "THE QUEEN OF ALGORAB"
CHF 30.00

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Winter arrives quietly at the old observatory. Frost creeps up the copper dome. By midnight it has dulled to silver under a hard white moon. She has kept this place for forty years, since the gears still turned smoothly and the telescope was the newest thing on the hill. For this wrapping paper we climbed up to find her there, still tending the same instruments, still watching for whatever the sky might show her next. A shooting star. A comet. A shape she hasn't charted yet. We call it "The Queen of Algorab," after the one she found and never stopped looking for.

She told us the story slowly, pausing to check a dial, to wipe frost from a lens. Every night she climbs the narrow stair, log book under one arm, and cranks the dome open to a seam of sky. The hinges complain, as they always have. Cold air pours in, carrying pine resin from the slope below.

One night, decades ago, fog swallowed every star she knew. She waited it out, sleeves pulled over her hands. Then a single gap opened directly above her. Through it, a shape she had never charted: a bird stretching its wings across the dark, one point at its edge burning steadier than the rest. An old colleague, visiting for the meteor shower, named it for her. Algorab, the crow's wing, a white star some eighty seven light years off, marking the corner of a small quadrilateral sailors once steered by. Its name comes from the Arabic for crow, older than the observatory, older than the hill itself.

She cannot see it all year. It climbs into view only as the coldest nights start to loosen their grip, low near the horizon before dawn, higher each week as the season turns. So she watches for it here, in this narrow stretch of winter, the way you might watch for one particular person in a crowd you know will thin eventually.

By morning the dome closes over a sky gone pale grey. She locks the door, leaves the key under the same stone as always, and walks down the hill. Somewhere above her, fading now, Algorab is already waiting for next winter to bring it back.