Olow x Cáit McEniff 

She doesn't draw with a pencil, she draws with scissors, and that detail says it all.

An illustrator and textile artist based in Leeds, she has understood something many search for a long time: constraint liberates. When you work with scissors in paper or fabric, you can't correct, you can't procrastinate. You just do it, and it's in that momentum that something true happens. A pencil leaves too much room for hesitation; scissors do not. Cut!

Her work is "wonky," she says, and she's proud of it. Not perfect, not neat, not smoothed by software. Shapes that resemble what you draw at six years old when you don't yet know you "should" draw well. This isn't nostalgia; it's a method, and she does it very well. She embraces her wobbly lines like others embrace their accent. Her universe is contained in a few words she repeats: nature, folklore, hands, movement.

“Ultimately, I'm just trying to make art and see the world like I did as a child. Letting myself be carried away by ideas, celebrating curiosity. Working with my hands and learning new things.”

She observes everything: people on the street, materials, shapes that repeat unnoticed. And when she reproduces this, on paper, on fabric, on an Olow t-shirt, something happens that we can't quite name. We recognize it, without knowing exactly what.

For Blend Energy, she brought this perspective, with pieces that look simple but are imbued with life. The Citizen with its portraits captured in motion, like people we pass by. The Fanfare, almost audible. The Aloha Shapes and Cubism, a graphic energy that needs no convincing.

She calls it "dance then stance": first the dance, then the posture. Move, then decide.

At Olow, we seek out artists before knowing exactly where it will lead us. With Cáit, it led us to the streets of Leeds, watching her wear her own illustrations, in her city, with the people she loves. No elaborate setting, no staging, just her and her partner enjoying the city's energy. That's Blend Energy.