Tierney Gearon’s collection of Hermès beach towels started by chance: as the American photographer was holidaying in St Barths with her family in the early 1990s, she stumbled upon a small shop run by French husband and wife team Catherine and Pero Feric. ‘It was a magical experience,’ Gearon recalls. ‘The husband would stand at the door and decide who could or could not enter. If you were lucky enough to be invited into their carefully curated space, the first thing you would see was a wall of shelves towering stacks of colourful towels [...] juxtaposed with idiosyncratic Caribbean décor.’
For years, the towels, sporting eccentric colour palettes, bold graphics and artistic interventions, were part of Gearon’s holiday traditions: to her, it felt like wrapping her children in art as they came out of the sea. By 2020, the collection featured about 30 towels, but after they started popping up in her online searches for collectible objects, she soon built an archive of more than 300 pieces.
For the past three years, Gearon has taken a few dozen towels with her whenever she was travelling, photographing them around nature, architecture and local spots. ‘Their beauty inspired a unique creative project: a travelogue that merges my love for design, photography and exploration,’ she says. Her self-published, limited-edition book, The Collection, documents both her travels and her archive of colourful towels: you’ll see them spread on the floor of a Moroccan courtyard, bathed with light against the backdrop of a Mexican house, fashioned into a tent in the Hamptons, engaging with architecture in Japan, or wrapping a hut in Colorado.
‘A towel, through the right lens, is not just a towel. It’s a fragment of a larger story, a symbol of home, childhood, escape and joy. The Collection is the intersection of my life as an artist, traveller, mother and impulsive collector. This project is my visual diary. It is a meditation on beauty, place and time,’ she writes in the book’s introduction. ‘A celebration of how the simplest object can become art when framed by imagination.’
The Collection: A Visual Diary of Towels and Travel, published in a limited edition of 1,000, $125, is available at tierneygearon.com and at alexeagle.com
