Jessica Diane Jones

Art Director, Photographer, Designer


Selected Work —
  Horizn Studios
  1. Air Series. Lightness. Elevated.
  2. Purple Night & Agave Green
  3. Life is a Journey
  4. All White. All your Stories.
  5. At First Light
  6. Dive into Serenity
  7. In-house Production
  8. Lifestyle-driven Content

  Flaconi
  1. Family Love
  2. Female Empowerment
  3. Corporate Imagery

Visual Diary

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Live is a Journey — Benjamin Patch

Role: Art Direction, Photography (2023) 



An innate curiosity for cultures is a driving force behind Benjamin Patch’s creative process. As part of the new interview format, the former professional athlete and self-proclaimed ceramic dancer invited us to peer behind the curtain and marvel at his life, his works, and his light-filled Berlin home. Live Is A Journey is a conversation-based series that contemplates intimate narratives and notions of travel. 

After a childhood in the South Pacific, an education in Utah, and a pit-stop playing volleyball in Italy before landing in Berlin, travel has been one key permanence in Benjamin Patch’s life.














Extract from the interview:  Benjamin Patch recently happened upon an archival comment from the depths of the internet and felt both flabbergasted and affirmed. It seems that, in that moment, he himself had unintentionally determined his path long before he knew it. “Furniture and interior design,” he had typed back to a curious fan asking him about his alternate calling if he were ever to quit his globally acclaimed volleyball career.       

It’s a sunny Friday morning, and I meet Benjamin at his airy Berlin-Mitte flat, sitting at a rustic table made by, you guessed it, himself. Like everything around us, from voluminous, organically shaped vases to slender, timeless candlesticks, stone chairs and metallic stools, it epitomises Benjamin’s creative oeuvre. Lest I forget his travel trinkets, like a woven bowl from Lagos, Nigeria, or rocks from Mallorca’s shores. Just days prior, the designer and art director had returned from a trip to California, where he had searched for waters and wilderness away from Berlin.

Every story from Benjamin’s journey underlines his reverence for the souls and places that have nurtured him, with love and validation as the seeds of his every move. Nature's wild influence, too, is evident in the materiality and tone of his pottery. The self-proclaimed ceramic dancer lives in a state of perpetual transience. He calls on his open mind and heart to evolve and remain fluid, and courageously follows his intuition. Traversing myriad places, from his remote, mountainous childhood homes in Utah and the South Pacific islands, and later to Italy and Berlin, his journey led him to find his truth, and to gain clarity and insights about the world around him. “It’s a very human experience, and very genuine to who I am as a person,” Benjamin says.

Adopted into a white Mormon family, a culture that wasn’t intrinsically his, “I came into this world under obscure circumstances,” he states. His parents, both medical professionals, soon moved the family of four to New Zealand, and later to neighbouring Tonga. Returning to Utah eight years later, Benjamin discovered his penchant for Volleyball – “a girl’s sport in my state at the time”. He grabs an earthy-hued, unevenly patterned pitcher, the first ceramic piece he crafted at the age of 14, and laughs: “Back then, I thought this was the ugliest thing on the planet. Now it’s my favourite item ever.” Design and pottery were Benjamin’s first love – before volleyball determined the course of his teenage and young adult life.   



Credits

Video Jonny Brooking
Assistant Matt McCann
Concept & Text Ac Schubert