The Rest Room: Ocki From Blue Shop Galleries

We’re thrilled to introduce The Rest Room Series, a new journey into thoughtfully crafted spaces that inspire calm, self-care, and connection. This series explores not only beautifully designed bathrooms but also the lives of the people behind them—their stories, passions, and the small rituals that keep them grounded amidst busy lives.

To kick off, we’re visiting Ocki from Blue Shop Galleries. For Ocki, her “rest room” is a space for grounding in the midst of running a bustling gallery - In addition to or in place of grounding, I think she describes it as an outlet for her personality and a place to have fun and explore colour with...

CELIA Hi, hello. So where do we find ourselves here?

OCKI So here we are in the Blue Shop gallery, in our little, sort of, hidden gallery. This is a much wilder sort of expression of, I guess, my own, love of colour. 

CELIA And why did you decide to do that in the bathroom as opposed to the rest of the gallery, or even your office? 

OCKI Good question! So the gallery started in my home. What was great about that is that people, collectors, for example, see how art looked in their homes, and that wasn't really being done that often commercially.
When we found this amazing new space, I sat down with my friend George, from Studio George London, who is an amazing interior designer, and we started talking about designing the space. The things we were talking about were light texture and, of course, colour. But the irony when you're talking about colour in a gallery is that actually a really good gallery doesn't say anything. It has quite a muted, neutral tone, so that when the shows roll in and roll out, it can still hold those paintings. So all my ideas, for example, having neon painted stairs and bright yellow insides of cupboards, we felt that that would be too much personality for the space.
I thought, ‘Where can I do my thing? Where can I put my colour?’ At the cottage, my loo in my house was used a lot. So this bathroom allowed me to add my sort of slight kitsch style. It was just a nice little unexpected moment in the gallery. And I just think it really works. And then, because of that, it means that we can hang art in here. 

CELIA It's so cool. How often do you bring the collection pieces in? Do you try to do that every time and show at least one of the pieces in this space? 

OCKI A lot of the works in our shows sit beautifully on colour. And so it's nice to be able to show smaller pieces from the show that we've got on, past works from other shows, because it opens up that conversation. We do a big online show called works on paper, which is an international open call to artists all over the world, and they can submit for free. It’s a special thing that we do; It's something I'm very proud of. So in here, opposite me, are two works on paper by Amy Beager and Florence Hutchings, who are two amazing exports who've come from the gallery. And then again, two beautiful works on paper by Orla Kane. And actually, these works in particular, people have become so obsessed with. And I think [this bathroom] is a way of visually talking about the things that we love. 

CELIA And what about some of the other features that you've chosen, outside of the art that you've decided to hang? What are some of your other favourite features? 

OCKI When I meet artists or makers or designers, I sort of fall in love. It’s similar to when people talk about falling in “friend love”. There's their work, and then there's them, and so you can't help but be like: ‘whatever I can do, you're going to be in my life’. Charlotte Kidger is one of those people. She's just a wonderful person. But she also makes beautiful work. And her [art] practice at the time—she's now set up this brand new, beautiful studio—was to take the dust from breeze blocks and, building sites generally, and collect it all up. So it's a surplus material that would have been binned. She collects it all up into bags, and she then injects it with a sustainable kind of sealant, and natural dyes.
And so she started making these mirrors, and I just fell in love with them. I love that the texture is very confusing. They look like they're quite soft, but they're actually really quite prickly and hard. And so that mirror was basically the start of this whole colour theory in here. I bought that mirror before we'd even got the keys for the gallery, so that was kind of the starter.

CELIA That's so cool. So obviously, at Reia, we're big fans of the colour green. Can you tell me about what green means to you and why green for the bathroom?

OCKI So this green was quite hard for me to get into. And George, my interior designer, said, ‘Come on, we can do this.’ And I was initially quite scared. But I think it really works. It gives you that sense of transition. A lot of my favourite restaurants or gig venues and other places like that, they have that magic kind of reveal factor. And so I think this green does that. 

CELIA And what's your favourite bathroom in the world?

OCKI Well, I was thinking about this. There's some very funky ones in London, like the bathroom at Sketch with the pods and the one at house 180 where you can look over the whole of London. But I think growing up, my favourite bathrooms were always designed by my mum. And there was this one bathroom iteration she did in this house in Ireland; It was this big room, beautifully carpeted, and then just a bath in the middle of the room. And you could look out of this portal to see mountains and the sea, and it was that sense of you wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
Also, as a young kid, I was quite naughty, so I was probably sent to the bathroom a few times. I was told to go in there and behave. And so bathrooms have become this kind of place of solace. I think there's something so nice about a bathroom; It's so intimate. And I think to not celebrate that would be such a shame.

 

CELIA I love that idea of a bathroom can be such a place of solace. I think so many people feel like that. And how important is that moment of peace, that moment of self care or self introspection for you when you're running the gallery?

OCKI Yeah, it’s so important. One thing that people who run their own businesses will talk about is that it is constant. It never turns off. So you wake up with a to-do list, you go to bed with a to-do list. It's a real discipline, I really have to be mindful, because otherwise you're just on all the time. As a team, we take an extra day off every week, because weekends, inevitably, you end up engaging with collectors. Otherwise it's just too much and it's just too much to think about.
About two years ago when we were doing the build, I was very, very overwhelmed with, I think, to be honest, with self doubt, asking myself whether I could do this. That was a very exhausting feeling, because you want to think you can do it. Anyway, I started running. And I know it's such a boring thing to say, but yes, I'm a Strava bitch. I started running, and I started running in the dark. I didn't want them to see anyone. And then, you start running in the daytime, and then eventually people said, she would go for a run together. 
And then I thought, actually, this has given me such genuine peace, and self-belief. It feeds you all the good things. So then, as these things happen, you think, ‘right, hang on what is Blue Shop? What is it? Is it just a gallery? Or is it about community? Is it about helping creative people?’ And yes, it is. 
And so we set up a run club. We're the uncoolest Run Club, because no one's got any of the kit, and we just meet up, and it's super low key. We'll do a slow 5k or an even slower 10k, but it's just that idea that you wouldn't expect [a run club] from a gallery. You don't expect a green bathroom, you don't expect that gallery to have a Run Club. But I think with all these things, you're running your own business, it has to be authentic to you. 

CELIA And what about when you get up in the morning? How do you start your day, or how do you close your day? Do you have any routines or rituals that you always incorporate? 

OCKI The good thing about having the dog is that he has to be walked every morning. And we're so lucky in Camberwell, as we have all these beautiful parks. I'm also very lucky that I've got the most wonderful neighbours, because when you live in a glass-fronted house, everyone knows you. And so there's often times I'm walking through Camberwell with Mole and there's such a sense of community, because the house has always been basically “open”. I think the morning ritual for me is actually about getting out there, exercise, and then people. Oh and coffee!

CELIA So you mentioned the mirror and the practice of [Charlotte Kidger] using deliberately discarded materials and repurposing them—which is so amazing—and that obviously chimes really well with our values at Reia. I'm interested to know if any of your other artists are using particularly sustainable practice practices, and is that something you champion?

OCKI Yeah, well, that's such a good question, because actually, so many artists that we work with are what people call “emerging artists”, which basically means, artists who are just starting out. So, of course, with that comes economical struggle; they can't just go and buy the finest papers, the finest canvases. And so what we found, which I love, and I love the fact that we can, like, dig a little deeper and find out by flipping things around and finding out what they're on. And one of our representative artists, Vivian McDermott, does this so beautifully.
When you see one of her paintings, some of them are oil on panel. But a lot of them say ‘oil on card’, and at the edges, there are these little fold lines. Anyway, we went up to her studio in Edinburgh a few weeks ago, and I decided to flip one over, and it was a humble Kellogg's packet! And I think there's something just so lovely about this! Art is very powerful. People hold it in such high regard, quite rightly, but then you turn it over and it's a Kellogg’s packet. So I think that, in itself, is sustainable, but it’s also a needs must thing.
Roya Bahram, is another represented artist that we're working with, who's just had an amazing sculpted fried egg in this gorgeous show for Frieze [Art Fair]. When you think about where she finds her materials, you’d expect her to be buying in these lumps of unbelievably glamorous marble. But when I was with her, we went up to these marble suppliers who are making really glamorous worktops, but they have these bins. So we walked in, and Roya said ‘Hi guys, could we go into your bins?’ And they're not used to having two women walking in and bin diving. And we started diving in, and she was like ‘oh, this is perfect. I can make a little frog out of this one’. It was this gorgeous, kind of olive green marble with flecks in it. And again, I just think there's something so lovely about taking something which has been discarded. Whether it's the Kellogg's pocket or the mirror or the stone, through their craft and their art, they're turning these discarded objects into something that is so beautiful and high art. It makes you kind of reconsider waste management more generally.

Ocki has our latest scent SILVA in the bathroom.