This is a process diary for the MZL 7 Space Shop. The shop releases products via drops, which are like mini collections in and of themselves and as part of our storytelling we want to add a text based component to the products. We will use this space to document the behind the scenes element both in terms of the visual but also the context hence the AESTHETIC SOURCE. It's in chronological order so click the READ THE LATEST button to read the latest entry. Enjoy.
16 Free Love
THE FIRST DROP
Before you rhetorically ask: who do you think is going to read this? We don’t know. I mean we’ve faced a lot worse than mere mockery at this point so I guess instead of answering that question we’re answering our own: why do we keep doing this?
There’s only one way to find out. And that’s by continuing to do it.
This is an alternative name for the MZL 7 Space Shop but first and foremost it is a process diary. I’m not calling it journal because we have Abnormal Pulse, but then again, you know, it’s similar.
Every drop released by The MZL 7 Space Shop is accompanied by an Aesthetic Note and a Source Note but whatever we manage to post on social media - even though it’s already a bit text heavy - there’s more to it, hence this space. After all: we are a fine arts studio so we imagine some people would be more interested in our process. So like everything else we do around here at MZL why not make it public?
We’re going to start with the Aesthetic & Source Notes for THE 16 FREE LOVE HEADWEAR DROP. We explained all that as this is the first entry. We won’t in the future. Now. Let’s go.
16 Free Love :: Aesthetic Note
The Aesthetic Note is about the visual naturally though it does speak to something greater. For this particular drop the idea of caps and a bucket hat was taken from something abstract yet something that does tie to the source (that comes next). Sixteen refers to age and the caps and bucket hat are about authority, 16 products in total, designed as a self-marketing technique for the studio, and coming from that personal autobiographical place this studio and its founder have been stuck in for a very long, long, long, long time.
Nothing about the anarchist philosophy mentioned here is directed at any actual country, religious or political ideology: it relates to it but this is strictly about art. It is about an emotion that says let me think what I want to think, let yourself think it without diminishing me, and let it exist as what it truly is: support for a shift in power dynamics. These 16 products are about the vulnerable age when I sought out freedom in every sense - academic, physical, geographical - and it was a lot to go through trying to understand one’s role and identity in a world that is asking you to prove your worth within it. I lived between The Netherlands and United Kingdom at that time and this is about the laws of consent, of culture, of denial, rebellion - pressure. At sixteen you’re not an adult but technically in The Netherlands and the UK you are in some senses. That’s why I chose the CoBrA artists. Their decision to maintain a childlike naivety in their work is something that has both intrigued me and deeply comforted me.
It was the age when I was violated but that violation also led me to art. So now after all of this time - when people sign and moan and roll their eyes: aren’t you over it yet? Yes, I am actually. Finally I am.
But I don’t think I’ll ever be over how it changed me as a person because it was more than just one isolated event for me. Clearly.
The poster at the end (on Instagram) was created intuitively though I really don’t want to describe myself as an intuitive artist - I think all art is intuitive to a degree — that poster reminds me of both a child’s birthday party and like some techno rave poster for teenagers, maybe a school dance. A combination of something innocent with something that wants to break free from it by crossing that threshold of curiosity: childlike, naive, and yet deliberate and bold.
Also the post on Instagram itself contains paintings from The CoBrA artists alongside the poster and some of those images are pixelated. I wouldn't say I intended for that but when I saw it it reminded me again of how that time was exactly that: child like, naive, blurry, not clear - not sharp - not entirely precise. Life is still like that but it lacks that childish quality in reality. Maybe that’s why I brought it back.
Because I like behaving like a child after growing up too fast and this is to remind everyone that doing that is not only normal but greatly encouraged.
16 Free Love :: Source Note
We kind of covered it above so I don’t feel like repeating it here. We / I - confusing time, confusing age, loss of innocence before it’s legal, Sixteen being sweet for that very reason - legally - and a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s a time I go back to only to remember why it matters so much and also to let it go. As many times as I can. That can and has looked like many things but ultimately it finds itself repeated somewhat forcefully through our art.
The First Paintings
THE SECOND DROP
First Paintings :: Aesthetic Note
Honestly, these paintings have been on shreyatanisha.com for several years and we just wanted to make them available on the shop as part of our initial arts funding ecosystem but also to show that we began humbly. Before going into competitive arts education I (Shreya Tanisha writing now) I began painting. It’s funny to think about it now. When I painted Singaporean Flowers I had no idea about all the art that already existed in the world, the masterpieces, the types of paintings I still can’t do today due to combination of lack of ability and patience. I just was presented with a paint brush, paints, a canvas, and an easel - I’m don’t even remember why exactly - and I loved it. I have since then loved a lot of things and I’m afraid of ending up as the jack of all traits and master of none so leaving that aside I just wanted to come back to this. I didn’t think was it good enough. I wasn’t being graded. Even in art school I never had a competitive streak - as in I didn’t compare myself to others. Some people noticed that and tried to make me change. I’m happy to report it hasn’t exactly happened. That’s what I’ll explain next.
First Paintings :: Source Note
I’m an insecure person. Some of that stems from trauma, a lot of it stems from just being a human being. I don’t like my face all the time, I don’t like how I look on camera, I have issues with my body, and as much as I focus on the mind and my creative output and think I’m above those things - to an extent I certainly am - but they still matter. There’s no way to say this without sounding arrogant so I’ll just go ahead and say it the way my therapist put it: I was subjected to envy attacks. I've been treated unfairly by both men and women and upon deep reflection I’m sure I’ve treated them unfairly as well. I love to point out hypocrisy but of course I’m a hypocrite myself. But I’m kind. I really don’t like the human warfare. I engage in it sure but I’m not a vindictive person. Regrets, I don’t have a few - I have disappointment in myself more than regret. So that’s where this comes from. A reminder to myself more than anything about the value - inherent and monetary - about when and why this all began. The girl who picked up a paintbrush. The toddler, actually. What did she want? What did her mind try to express and what was she feeling? It was a whole lot better than what she’s become as an adult. So even if I’m criticized for it perhaps it is simply time to realize that being more childlike is greater than being some version of a human being who acts like she has everything figured out. So The First Paintings: they came from a sacred place and that place is worth returning to and protecting.
MZL Non-Binary
THE THIRD DROP
Non-Binary Drop :: Aesthetic Note
Many of these seven initial drops have the source - the background story - but they are quite boldly promotional material. We are asking you to pay us and promote us at the same time. Whilst that’s how many businesses work I do think we’re being pretty bold to assume that people will invest in this when by and large it’s a one woman (Shreya Tanisha) show and we don’t have some grand marketing plan or investments. We just think we’re good enough to be invested in. We hope people will either do that through these drops or eventually find something appealing in our future drops and then fall in love with the studio and come back and buy these products. Either way, this is how we’re doing it and I’ve stopped second-guessing myself. If it works it works and if it doesn’t we get back to work to make it work again. That's our job. That’s why we’re doing this.
Non-Binary Drop :: Source Note
I discovered I didn’t fit a traditional gender type probably most definitively around the age of 21 when I also changed my name. It’s not some big political statement or something I need to explain to people. At least not in the way a gay person comes out to the world or someone trans needs gender reassignment surgery. I’m agender or more commonly understood as non-binary. And yes it has at times felt like a problem even though it isn't a huge one. I don’t fully embrace femininity in the way many women do and I had to really confront myself about it partially because I didn’t understand and mainly because society finds a way to make you feel weird about it. It’s not that I don’t like feminine things it’s just I never found myself greatly interested in any of it. I like seeing women who dress up in really nice dresses and wear make up or jewelry and get all dressed up and present themselves in what is recognized as traditionally feminine or sexualized ways. I get it. I just never felt like it was something that was natural for me. It doesn’t feel like me and that started feeling problematic because I am a girl and a woman and society has and will always have expectations. It took some years for me to finally say I understand what people want but this is what I want. And once I said it I became ferocious. That’s what the MZL Non-Binary Drop is all about. Wearing clothes that say in a world built on assigned gender roles performed for profit we would like to try to profit from playing exactly the role we want to play. It has nothing to do with judgment though people always like to throw that at you when you don’t meet their demands and expectations. This is just who I am. I’m not saying it’s better and I don’t want you to say it’s worse.
Just let it be.
Inaugural Drinkware
THE FOURTH DROP
Inaugural Drinkware Drop :: Aesthetic Note
MC Escher: words will never do justice. I didn’t start off with him in mind but the truth about my relationship with mind-altering substances like his art is it started in The Netherlands and then it continued and then it had to stop and it had darkness and light and now I don’t drink alcohol but it - and other things - played a significant role in my life and artistic journey. So that’s tied into this. What we consume shapes how we feel and how we feel influences how we see the world and how we see the world is expressed in what we make. Let’s start there.
The products in this drop don’t have much to do with MC Escher visually but they speak to something deeper with simplicity.
Basically, I used to look at MC Escher’s prints, and lots of other art, and still I’d drink alcohol etc., and then at a different stage in life now I’ve realized that looking at his work or any art can produce the same results just without the hangover and for me life-threatening side effects. But this isn’t a ban drugs & alcohol and mental health awareness campaign. Not entirely.
This is a please support the MZL Fine Art Studio campaign.
Inaugural Drinkware Drop :: Source Note
These are getting shorter over time as they should. The source note for this is revelatory not in a bad way necessarily - the past is the past. I started drinking alcohol at a young age but I lived in The Netherlands so that was quite normal. Alongside other mind altering substances. This drop is not a promotion for any of that as I’m now a completely sober person and have been for quite some time. I also always reiterate safety, responsibility, and legality, when discussing this part of my life: the message isn’t do whatever you want, it’s learn from what I’m sharing with you. I lived through these phases to cultivate a different relationship with what I now drink - partly because I am Bipolar and that means drinking alcohol is now out of the question - and partly because being able to let things go when they feel they’ve run their course is a superpower.
These pieces are functional, fun, self-promotional, and just a start, so no matter what you’re drinking the point of this drop is to integrate into your daily life and in a world full of so much stuff, so much noise: why not support a fine arts studio?
I know I would. Stay hydrated & happy shopping!
Homebody
THE FIFTH DROP
The Homebody Drop :: Aesthetic Note
The reference is the Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht, 1924.
Gerrit Rietveld built it as a live-in extension of De Stijl, the Dutch avant-garde movement co-founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. Where Mondrian reduced the world to primary colour on canvas, red, blue, yellow held by black lines with white breathing between them, Rietveld made the same argument in three dimensions. Flat planes of colour on the facade. Cantilevered balconies that hover without visible support. Lines that extend past their own corners as if the building refuses to be contained by its edges.
He built it for Truus Schröder, a widow who told him she did not want walls. The entire upper floor opens with sliding and rotating panels, walls that fold away so inside and outside stop being separate conditions. You don't move through the house. The house moves around you.
In De Stijl, primary colour is not decoration. It is structure. Red asserts. Blue holds. Yellow claims. Against black and white these colours become load-bearing, in the eye the way steel is in a frame. MZL works from the same logic. Colour across the artwork series, Despair, Singaporean Flowers, Azadi, Kali, Anxiety, Dr TJ Eckleburg, is deliberate. The Homebody Drop carries that into the objects you live with: the print on a blanket, the vessel of a candle, the rug your feet land on first thing in the morning. Nothing is incidental.
The home is not a retreat. It is the place where you are most deliberately yourself. This collection lives indoors but faces out. The walls are panels.
The window is always open.
The Homebody Drop :: Source Note
I have Bipolar I. It has defined and debilitated my life for years. There have been extended periods where the inside of a room was the full extent of my world, not by choice, but by the nature of what the illness does. Extreme introversion as a symptom, not a personality trait. Isolation that arrives without asking.
The question I kept returning to was not how to escape it but what to do inside it. How do you make isolation productive? How do you turn confinement into something you chose, even when it was chosen for you?
This is not a new question. Yayoi Kusama has lived and worked voluntarily in a psychiatric facility in Tokyo since 1977, continuing to produce some of the most recognised art of the 20th and 21st centuries from inside its walls. Frida Kahlo spent years confined to her bed after her bus accident, painting from a specially built easel mounted above her. She made her immobility the subject. Francisco Goya, profoundly deaf and in self-imposed isolation in the Quinta del Sordo, painted directly onto the walls of the building he was trapped inside. The Black Paintings were never meant to be shown. They were made because making was the only available act. Henry Darger worked entirely alone for decades, producing one of the largest known works of outsider art, discovered only after his death.
The pattern is not suffering producing art. It is the refusal to let confinement be the end of the sentence.
The Homebody Drop is built from that same refusal. If you are going to spend time inside, whether by illness, circumstance, or choice, the space you occupy should be considered, intentional, and full of meaning. The objects around you matter. What you wear inside your own home matters. The scent in the room matters.
This collection is for the hours when the world outside is not accessible and the world inside has to be enough. Art as ultimate communication and connection when faced with debilitation and isolation.
Move Easy
THE SIXTH DROP
The Move Easy Drop :: Aesthetic Note
Everyone has an opinion on how you should move.
What to carry. What to wear. Where to go. How to get there.
Which way is the right way.
Move Easy is a refusal of that argument. It's totes and shoes and socks — but underneath that, it's the quiet insistence that you move through this world on your own terms. Not by class. Not by gender.
Not by anyone else's map.
The only right way to move is your way and with who you decide.
The Move Easy Drop :: Source Note
Moving isn't just about place.
My life has been all about moving. From one place to the next, one chapter to the next, one version of myself to the next.
It's about the version of yourself you carry with you — and the one you're walking toward.
The Move Easy Drop isn't about getting from A to B. It's about what it means to move through your own life with intention. The bag on your shoulder. The shoes on your feet. The socks keeping you grounded. All of it, custom made. All of it, yours.
Move easy.
Autonomy
THE SEVENTH DROP
The Autonomy Drop :: Aesthetic Note
There is no version of self-love that doesn't begin with self-definition.
The Autonomy Drop is for people who have stopped asking for permission to exist as they are.
Who wear what they want, write what they think, and refuse to be flattened by expectations that were never made for them.
There's something about that moment when your first order arrives. It lands and you know — keep moving. Even when you have to do it alone.
Art on your body. Words in your hands. Both entirely yours.
The Autonomy Drop :: Source Note
This one is the last one. The final drop of our first 7 launch series.
Not because it has nothing left to say — because it says the most important thing last.
Be who you truly are. Let your art define you. Know your thoughts. Know yourself. Love yourself.
Never let external limitations and impositions define who you are.
You can respect the world without allowing it to disrespect you.
This is where you remember: you own yourself.
Beach
THE EIGHTH DROP
& THE FIRST AFTER THE FIRST SEVEN DROPS
The Beach Drop :: Aesthetic Note
There is no version of self-love that doesn't begin with self-definition.
The Beach Drop stays true to the styles we have introduced so far. The artwork is drawn from The First Seven Drops & The First Paintings and from the STC x JMB Drop (Read more about it in DIVINE INSPIRATION, under THE ART section) — the two bodies of work that define MZL 7 Space Shop's visual language to date. The beach is not a reason to start again. It is a reason to wear what we already know.
The Beach Drop :: Source Note
Water. Not a specific beach or a single memory, but a pattern I have traced across my whole life — boarding school, Doha, Bali, India, and several other places besides. Every place I have loved has had the sea in it. And every time I have been away from water for too long, I have felt the difference.
The ocean reminds me that there is more out there than the built world. More than what human beings have constructed and decided and named. It points toward something larger — a higher purpose, a meaning that I cannot always articulate but that I feel clearly. That is what the sea is to me. Not an escape. A reminder.