YOU CRAFTY THING - SADDLING UP WITH MARY WING TO
AS CHAMPIONS OF BRITISH CRAFTSMANSHIP, WE WERE DELIGHTED TO ASK LEATHER ARTISAN MARY WING TO TO CREATE A BESPOKE LEATHER SCULPTURE CELEBRATING THE LATEST FRAGRANCE, FORTUITOUS FINLEY
Published 312 days ago
12 min read
As Penhaligon’s welcomes another member of the Portraits Collection into the fold, we also turn our noses to championing British craftsmanship once again. We invited leather artisan and whip maker, Mary Wing To, to create a bespoke horse sculpture in honour of Fortuitous Finley. Underneath his gilded horse-head cap, a fragrance of salted pistachio and leather awaits. And it is this leather that inspired Mary’s creation.
MARY WING TO, WHIP MAKER & LEATHER ARTISAN
No one has quite been on a journey like Mary’s. The whip-maker pursued her interest in fashion at the London College of Fashion before taking a two-year saddlery course to improve her leather craft – after all, leather and fashion have gone hand-in-hand for many a year. Mary didn’t stop there: she received a QEST scholarship to hone her leather-work skills, training under the eye of the late Queen Elizabeth’s Master Saddler at Buckingham Palace before starting her own whip-making company.
Needless to say, her talents haven’t gone unnoticed by fashion (and fragrance) brands, and Mary has built up quite the fantastic following. Is it any wonder we invited her to create a bespoke sculpture in honour of Fortuitous Finley?
“THERE'S SOMETHING MAGNETIC ABOUT A WORK THAT HOLDS TENSION BETWEEN STRENGTH AND SOFTNESS, PAST AND PRESENT, REFINEMENT AND RAWNESS"
LEATHER ARTISAN & WHIPMAKER
THE PROCESS
A work of art isn’t made overnight, and this is certainly the case for the horse sculpture. Embracing new knowledge with each bespoke project, Mary learned how to MIG weld to create the skeleton for the horse, shaped out of 30 metres of stainless steel rods. Once the skeleton was made, Mary created a pattern for each panel to cut the leather to the right size.
The most time-consuming aspect of the sculpture is the leather working, from the selection of the hide (an oak-tanned leather, a process which itself took 14 months), to the cutting of the skin, the skiving, and finally the moulding and stitching of the leather panels to create the horse’s hide. Mary clocked in over 500 hours bringing the sculpture to life. Crafted entirely by hand, each one of the 5,400 holes in the leather was punched manually, as was 160 metres of leather lace meticulously woven to make the horse's dressage braids and to sew the panels together.
What makes this sculpture all the more powerful is its embrace of the non-finito tradition, where a work is left intentionally incomplete to show the complexity of the layers, textures and materials used in the sculpture. The glimpse of the steel skeleton reveals the sculpture's vulnerability and strength simultaneously, and highlights the intricate craftsmanship which makes this one of Mary’s most ambitious projects yet.
We sat down with Mary to dive into the full creative process. See the horse sculpture come to life in the video below:
