BIRKENSTOCK UTTI LACE WITH LIAM ALVY & BOSHKA GRYGORIEW-ALVY

Sitting in the southern-most corner of the United Kingdom, a stone’s throw away from Land’s End, is St Ives. A coastal delight looking out over the Celtic Sea and boasting some of the mildest winters and warmest summers in the whole country, the small town in Cornwall is home to Liam Alvy and Boshka Grygoriew-Alvy, a creative couple who relocated to the idyllic beach-front town from the metropolis of London after visiting on holiday. Once a bustling fishing town, St Ives, like many coastal communities, has become a haven for those looking to escape the hustle and bustle of the city and opt for a calmer pace of life, to pursue their passions away from the dog-eat-dog nature of the country’s metropolises. 

Having met in Leeds, both Liam and Boshka ended up working as tattoo artists, but their adventurous spirit has seen them venture into different realms of creative practice, with Liam opening St Ives’ only traditional tattoo studio, Tattoo Days, painting and exhibiting his work and Boshka creating handmade chainstitched embroidery pieces, painting and working as a meditation practitioner. “We were just over living in the city. We've been between Leeds and London since we met, so 15 years?” Liam reflected when asked about what the impetus was that led the couple to trade regular city life for rural, coastal living. Adding to her husband’s comment, Boshka offered further insight into St Ives’ appeal, “It's a magnet. It definitely pulls in artists and hippies and quirky people. And you get here, and you suddenly feel like it's okay to be weird.” It’s perhaps this sense of community and cultural freedom that positions places like St Ives as an alternative for creative people who are fatigued by the continued misnomer that in order to be creative, you have to live in London or at least in a big city.

With their creative pursuits spreading out across a myriad of disciplines, Liam and Boshka’s time is spent balancing their interests. Having moved away from tattooing, Boshka felt herself drifting away from the art-form and gravitating to something else entirely. “I just naturally started developing another passion, and at the time, I was going to sound baths quite a lot. It just started taking up so much of my time that it started to slowly slip into my work as well,” Boshka offers when asked what led her to pursue something different, “A lot of my work was inspired by Asian culture as well, a lot of yogic traditions, a lot of imagery from yoga. The more I did it, the more I wanted to submerge myself into that, and it was similar with tattooing. When I discovered it, I wanted to go into that headfirst.” Echoing her decision to leave London, the allure of sound baths and meditation caught Boshka’s attention for their ability to allow you to find calm even within the city, “what got me so hooked with the sound and the experience of it was finding peace and quiet within the noise of London. I had always been spiritually curious and during the sound baths, there were moments where I felt like I was melting into just nothing, into stillness. It's really hard to explain but it was just really, really beautiful to experience peace without really having to try really hard.” Continuing on the impact this experience had on her, Boshka says, “It was actually just being, and it was enough. The more I did it, the more I realised that I don't actually need to go and seek and do too much. I can come back to this practice and just be with it.”

Being pulled towards a creative practice is something familiar to Liam, too, having somewhat fallen into work as a tattoo artist. “I don't think I ever planned for it to be a job. I just really liked getting tattooed myself because I just wanted to be covered head to toe because I just liked the way it looked,” Liam says, “I was painting before tattooing. I've always drawn my whole life and not necessarily the big paintings.” Speaking with Liam, it’s clear that his approach to tattooing and painting are not all dissimilar – they both centre around practice, time and continual progress, “if you've developed a style and it's your work, it's like with anything, you should be able to tell the person that did it. You're not going to completely change the aesthetic on every single piece because then it's not you. Your style is what you've developed over your lifetime, you know?”

It’s this slowness and calmer pace that reverberates between both Liam and Boshka’s outlook – perhaps a clear signal as to why the couple were so enamoured with St Ives and made their spur of the moment decision to move there. In both of their creative work, their move to the southernmost region of the country has offered space to take their time away from the stresses of city living, and it’s clear that both Liam and Boshka have found joy in slowing things down and taking life at a gentler pace.