The Maybe Drawer: Six UK Creatives on What They Keep and Why

Somewhere in Britain, right now, a drawer is refusing to close. It is not a metaphor. It is the bottom drawer of a desk in Glasgow, and it contains three broken tile shards, a glaze test that went the colour of weak tea, and a ticket stub from a ferry that no longer runs.

I have spent the last few weeks asking six UK creatives to open their personal archives. Not the polished portfolios, not the tidy Instagram grid, but the shoeboxes, sketchbooks and 'someday' drawers where the unresolved stuff lives. I came to this as a curator, which means I am less interested in the perfect object than in the evidence of looking. A failed print can tell you more about a designer's eye than a finished poster. A fabric swatch with a coffee ring on it is a small diary entry.

The question underneath all of it: when does a personal archive become a creative engine rather than a fire hazard?

Mira, ceramicist, Glasgow

Mira's drawer is heavy. It has to be. She keeps broken tile shards from a demolished public toilet, glaze test tiles in a spectrum of almost-right greens, and a folded paper bag from a shop that closed in 2019. 'I don't keep things because they're beautiful,' she says. 'I keep them because they're unresolved.' The tile shards are about surface. The glaze tests are about failure. The paper bag is about a colour she has not managed to mix yet. Once a year she empties the drawer onto the kitchen table and photographs everything. The photograph becomes a mood board; the drawer goes back to being a drawer.

Owen, graphic designer, Leeds

Owen's archive is mostly paper, and mostly wrong. Misregistered Risograph prints. Proofs with typos circled in red. Beer mats from pubs where he has sketched type on the back. He keeps them in a flat file under his desk, organised by nothing except 'when I last panicked'. 'The finished work goes to clients,' he says. 'The mistakes stay with me.' Every few months he pulls out a stack and forces himself to find one thing he can steal from his own past: a colour combination, a crop, a bit of accidental overprinting. The drawer is not a museum. It is a recycling bin with better taste.

Priya, textile artist, Leicester

Priya keeps fabric swatches the way other people keep receipts. There are dye samples on cotton, linen and a piece of curtain lining she rescued from a skip. There are labels cut from charity-shop clothes, threads wound around old business cards, and a small bag of dust from a natural dye bath that went spectacularly wrong. 'I need to touch things before I can think about them,' she says. The archive is tactile, and that is the point. When she is stuck, she does not look at Pinterest. She opens the box and lets her hands do the browsing.

Tom, illustrator, Bristol

Tom's archive is a stack of A6 sketchbooks held together with elastic bands, plus a shoebox of cinema tickets and receipts with doodles on the back. The sketchbooks are chronological, but only loosely. Some pages are dated, some are not. Some have three drawings, some have one line and a phone number. 'I don't want it to be a diary,' he says. 'I want it to be a place where bad ideas can nap.' He raids it twice a year for a self-published zine. The zine is not a best-of; it is a best-of-the-ones-that-didn't-work. The archive gives the failures a second life, which is a polite way of saying it lets them be useful.

Nia, bookbinder, Cardiff

Nia's drawer smells of glue and old paper. She keeps offcuts too small to bind with, endpapers from abandoned projects, thread ends, and a collection of library cards from the old Cardiff Central Library. 'I like the evidence of use,' she says. A book is not just a design object; it is a thing that gets handled. Her archive is a reminder that making is a physical negotiation with materials. When she is planning a new binding, she does not start with a mood board. She starts with a box of scraps and a question: what can this bit of leftover cloth become?

Callum, sound artist, Belfast

Callum's archive is the least visual and the most eerie. He keeps cassette inlays, field-recording notebooks, flyers for gigs that never happened, and a hard drive of unlabelled audio files named things like 'rain near the bins' and 'door that sounds like a question'. 'The notes are more important than the recordings,' he says. 'They tell me where to listen again.' Once a month he opens a random folder and listens for ten minutes. Most of it is rubbish. Occasionally there is a texture he can use. The archive is not a library; it is a set of prompts.

The drawer as engine

What strikes me across all six is that none of them are archiving for posterity. They are not building a museum. They are keeping a compost heap: stuff goes in, breaks down, and occasionally feeds something new. The trick is the ritual. Mira's annual emptying. Owen's forced re-reading. Priya's hands-on browsing. Tom's twice-yearly zine raid. Nia's scrap-first planning. Callum's random listening. Without the ritual, the drawer is just clutter. With it, the drawer becomes a quiet engine.

So if you have a drawer of good intentions, do not tidy it away just yet. Give it a job. Set a date. Open it. Find one thing that still hums. The archive does not need to be neat. It needs to be used.