Homegrown and Handmade: Paola McKenna
By Clara Dudley
All images courtesy of Paola McKenna
Follow Paola/Studio Folklore on Instagram @studiofolklore or visit her website StudioFolklore.net
Onion skins, pomegranate, walnut shells, avocado pits, indigo. Macrame plant hangers, hand-woven textile necklaces, and soft-hued mesh bags. Studio Folklore is built on grounded earthy palettes and natural textures, presented in minimalist photography that suggest a lifestyle of warmth and close attention.
Paola McKenna, the Colombian-born founder of Studio Folklore, is in her Madrid apartment, a plant bathing in the sunny corner of the room. Paola and her partner moved to Madrid from Dublin over a year ago, where she’s maintained her work focused on natural dyeing methods, sustainable textiles and reusable bags, stylish organic décor and homemade kits inspired by traditional crafts of Latin America. Her work is succinctly described her Instagram bio as “Natural dyeing. Slow textiles. Creating and mending with natural colour.”
Naturally dyed organic twine
Textiles in the process of dyeing
Some of the natural dried materials used to make dye
In the process
Paola’s passion for adventure has been at the helm of the journey from Latin America to Europe. Growing up, she always wanted to travel. An opportunity to study Advertising and Marketing in Buenos Aires nine years ago provided a way to branch out from Colombia. And when she met her partner from Dublin as he was travelling in South America, Ireland eventually became the next stop.
Landing in Dublin in 2013, the biggest challenge was the language barrier, so Paola immediately prioritized learning English in order to acclimate. She surrounded herself with English-speaking friends and eventually worked in retail. However, the most challenging part “was also the most exciting,” she says. “I got to see how much I could progress … I was much more capable than I ever thought possible.”
Paola teaching macrame
Participants of a macrame plant hanger workshop in Dublin
Growing restless with retail work and interested in something more creative beyond her Marketing studies, she established Studio Folklore in 2018. “One of the reasons that I decided to go with natural dyeing is it helped me to reconnect with that crafty part of myself but also with nature.” When she was a child, she would spend holidays at her grandmother’s. With no TV or screens available at her grandmother’s expansive rural land, she was out playing in nature all day.
“One of the reasons that I decided to go with natural dyeing is it helped me to reconnect with that crafty part of myself but also with nature.”
She was not fully aware of or engaged in natural dyeing or weaving during her life in Colombia, but had returned with renewed interest to the handmade traditions that have shaped her own craft. “’Folklore’ is made of two words,” she says, “‘Lore’ is all of the knowledge and traditions that pass through generations. It is a sort of manifestation that identifies the ‘folk’.”
Cocora Valley, rural Colombia. Photo by Fernanda Fierro via Unsplash
Macrame necklaces: variations of colour and stitch
Three sizes of organic hand-dyed zero-waste produce bags
“[Folklore] involves all the traditions that make the ‘folk’ who they are.”
It goes beyond stories or mythology, as is commonly associated with the word. “It involves all the traditions that make the ‘folk’ who they are. It’s not formal. You don’t learn it through formal education. You learn it in a verbal way, or show people how to do it. So that opens the meaning of the word.” Even food, language, music, recipes - “that’s the ‘lore’ that the ‘folk’ are passing on.”
If a new language was the goal to achieve in Ireland, moving to a Spanish-speaking country was like finding home again. They were also drawn to the lifestyle – laid back, slower, sunnier. In Madrid, Paola appreciates the diversity and the sustaining resonance with Latin American culture. She can find the Colombian foods there that weren’t available in Ireland, and speak easily with the shopkeepers and neighbours (“there are still things I say that they don’t understand, though!”)
Now, her focus is how to adapt her business to the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact on her work and income, which relied on quick flights over to Dublin to give hands-on workshops to tech companies and in other group spaces. As hard-hit Spain exits lockdown, air travel and group gatherings across Europe are still somewhat restricted.
The demand for wholesale and e-commerce has gone up, but the future dream of a physical studio or brick-and-mortar storefront model is uncertain. And as with so many people around the world, she has needed to adjust and slow down.
Amidst a newly strained economy, what remains her greatest goal with Studio Folklore? “To give people the opportunity to reconnect to nature somehow, to explore these options themselves. To pass it on.”
Paola with a macrame necklace. Image courtesy of Paola McKenna
Follow Paola/Studio Folklore on Instagram @studiofolklore or visit her website StudioFolklore.net
