I've always rearranged my space when I felt off. Moving the sofa, clearing the shelves, turning the desk to face a different wall. It never really felt like tidying. It was closer to a reset, and something in me would settle once the room had shifted.
I wanted to understand why.
That curiosity is what became my dissertation. I spent a year reading across neuroscience, psychology and design theory, trying to work out how the spaces we sit in actually shape how we feel. Two writers anchored most of it. Professor Semir Zeki, the UCL neurobiologist whose work on the visual cortex made me realise the brain isn't simply reacting to a room. It is actively looking for pattern and order within it. And Carl Gustav Jung, whose idea of the psyche as a self-balancing system gave me a language for what I'd been quietly noticing in my own body for years. Around them I read Colin Ellard on psychogeography, Ethan Kross on the inner voice, Ilse Crawford on sensorial design, and Juhani Pallasmaa on the way architecture is read by the whole body, not just the eyes. Alongside the reading I ran my own sensory experiments. Small studies into what happens to a person when order is added to or taken away from a space.
What kept turning up was that a space is never really neutral. It is always doing something to you, even when you don't notice, and the body usually registers it before the mind does.
The problem is that spaces are slow and expensive to change. When someone is stressed or overstimulated, they can't redesign their environment to fix it. They need something smaller. Something they can sit with for a few minutes when life is loud.
That's where Breathing Line came from.
I wanted to take what the dissertation pointed to and gather it into a single object: spatial order, sensory regulation, and the role of the breath in calming the nervous system. Colour, sound, light and a paced breath, working together. Not a room you have to walk into, but a point of focus you can sit with when you need to come back to yourself.
For me it's a continuation of the same question I started asking at university, only at a much smaller scale.