The Atelier

These letters combine longer-form writing from the atelier with practical news and offerings. For the latter, you can always skip ahead to From the Workshop.

Over the past few weeks, the barn beside our house has slowly begun to become a working laboratory. I am writing this just after the autumn equinox, as the balance here in Vermont has perceptibly begun to tip from the long days of summer toward the darker half of the year.

The building dates to the early nineteenth century, a timber-frame barn built atop the bank that slopes down to the Mad River. Its enormous hand-hewn beams still carry the marks of the iron tools that shaped them. When I arrived in Vermont this summer, the future workshop was still filled with boxes, lumber, furniture and laboratory equipment waiting to find their places.

There are now wild-harvested herbs hanging from the rafters and medicinal mushrooms from the forest in the dehydrator. Bottles have begun to populate the shelves. My glass alembics and copper stills are finding their places. Skincare preparations are returning to production. The apothecary is taking shape. There is a forge and a furnace for the metalwork. Upstairs, I have begun arranging another area for my library and study, alongside a large worktable for drawing, bookbinding, jewelry-making and whatever other work finds its way there. Beside my principal workbench is a very old cast-iron woodstove. It is almost time to start using it.

As the workshop takes form around me, I have found myself thinking about the word atelier.

The workshops of early modern alchemists could contain what we would now regard as several entirely different disciplines beneath one roof: furnace and library, pharmacy and metal shop, garden and observatory. Plants drying from the rafters. Distillation apparatus crowding the benches. Metals were melted, medicines prepared, manuscripts consulted, observations recorded.

Some of these workshops existed in the orbit of royal and aristocratic courts, supported by patrons interested in medicine, metallurgy, natural philosophy and the secrets of matter. Others were considerably more modest and served the needs of local communities. What interests me is the form itself.

Thinking and making had not yet been assigned to different buildings. Neither, necessarily, had medicine, art, craft and natural philosophy.

Several centuries later, the Arts and Crafts movement returned to a related question. William Morris was concerned not simply with making beautiful objects, but with the conditions under which they could continue to be made in an industrial age: the relationship between maker and material, usefulness and beauty, work and the person performing it.

Morris did not withdraw from commerce. He established workshops, employed craftspeople, took commissions and sold what they made. The question was what forms of production allowed the character of the thing - and the intelligence of its making - to survive.

That question feels increasingly personal for me. For much of the last decade, I have been trying to understand how alchemical preparations might exist in the modern world. Their manufacture can involve weeks or months of work, unusual materials, specialized equipment, and processes that sometimes make considerably more sense at the scale of dozens or hundreds than tens of thousands.

And yet - I want these things to travel. I want them to find their way into treatment rooms, homes and medicine cabinets. I want practitioners to work with them, and I want the commerce around them to sustain further research, better materials, new preparations and the continued development of the workshop.

For a time, I participated in the contemporary experiment of building a company intended to scale around some of this work: investment, growth projections, customer acquisition, increasingly elaborate infrastructure, and the assumption - so ubiquitous that it can become almost invisible - that a successful business is one capable of becoming very large.

I learned a great deal from that experiment, some of it through expensive lessons. Over time, one question became harder for me to ignore:

What happens when the requirements of scaling a thing begin to alter the nature of the thing itself?

Farmers, winemakers, herbalists, chefs, craftspeople and artists encounter versions of the same problem. Increasing production can require changing materials, simplifying or mechanizing processes, or designing the object around the requirements of distribution rather than designing the distribution around the object.

There is nothing inherently virtuous about being small, nor anything inherently corrupting about growth. The question I have become more interested in is one of right scale: What is the scale appropriate to the thing being made, and what kind of economic structure allows it to remain fully itself?

Increasingly, I think I can see the beginnings of an answer. And that answer looks less like a startup now, and more like an atelier.

Perhaps part of what has taken me so long to understand is that I wasn't only looking for a different scale of business. I was looking for a form capacious enough to contain the work.

The different currents of my practice have sometimes been difficult to explain together. Herbal medicine, skincare, metallurgy and silversmithing, astrology, writing, bookmaking, the study and practice of historical alchemy… According to the categories of contemporary professional life, these can appear to be unrelated pursuits.

Inside the atelier, they make sense beside one another.

A medicinal plant and a piece of silver are both materia. The furnace used to refine a metal and the still used to separate the volatile principles of a plant belong to the same investigation of matter. Drawing, writing and bookmaking are ways of recording and transmitting that investigation. Medicine is one application of it. Craft is another.

Alchemy was always capable of holding these things together. It became clear to me that what I needed was a structure capable of doing the same.

An atelier is also more than a physical workshop. It exists within an ecology of relationships: people who use what is made here; practitioners who incorporate the preparations into their own work; individual clients; fellow researchers, physicians and craftspeople; collectors and commissioners; readers and correspondents. And historically there have also been patrons - people who recognize that certain forms of work are worth helping to exist.

The atelier allows the work to take the form appropriate to it. A jar of skincare can remain a jar of skincare. A difficult metallic preparation might be produced only a few times each year. A medicine may belong primarily in the hands of practitioners. An object might be made for one particular person. A line of investigation may produce nothing commercially useful at all, while changing everything that comes afterward.

A correspondence begun through one of these letters might eventually become a friendship, a collaboration, a commission, or something none of us could have predicted in advance.

None of this requires rejecting the tools of the present. A workshop in rural Vermont can correspond directly with readers around the world, send preparations to practitioners thousands of miles away, publish its own writing, find unusual materials and instruments, and sustain relationships that would once have depended upon physical proximity or networks of patronage.

The question, for me, is whether those tools can serve the workshop rather than requiring the workshop to reorganize itself around them.

This is increasingly how I understand Mad River Alchemy: not principally as a brand containing a collection of products, but as the name for the workshop itself - and for the various things that emerge from it.

For practitioners. I have recently completed a practitioner catalogue for estheticians, herbalists, bodyworkers and other practitioners interested in working with preparations from the atelier. If you would like a copy - or know someone whose work might resonate with mine - reply to this letter and I would be glad to send it along.

The Inner Firmament. With the autumn equinox, I am preparing to open a very small number of individual engagements extending the work described in my last letter: traditional medical astrology, spagyric medicine, planetary preparations and sustained conversation brought together into an individualized form of practice. I will share the full details soon.

In the laboratory. Skincare is returning to production alongside botanical tinctures, spagyric preparations and the more esoteric metallic medicines I have developed over the years. As the shelves fill, I will begin sharing more here about what is available directly from the workshop.

For now, autumn is beginning to make itself felt here in Vermont. The mugwort outside the workshop has begun to redden and flower. Mushrooms are popping up in the woods. The nights are colder. I am splitting and stacking wood beside the door to my lab, and soon there will be a fire in my woodstove.

And the workshop is beginning its work.

Nick
Mad River Alchemy