Subspace grew out of a long fascination with rope, bodies, art and the spaces in between.
What began as something deeply personal slowly became a way of teaching, connecting and eventually creating the kind of place I had once needed myself.
My first encounter with Shibari was through photography. At first, I was drawn to it visually: the lines of rope, the shapes it created, the way it could transform the body.
Later, almost by chance, I met someone who was learning to tie. I began travelling with her to workshops as her model, experiencing Shibari from the other side of the rope while quietly becoming more and more curious about how it all worked.
When I came home, I started practising on myself. For quite a long time, that was how I learned: tying, untying, trying again, figuring out what the rope was doing and why.
Eventually, self-tying wasn't enough. So I made my own rather questionable models by stuffing clothes with pillows and tying those instead.
It wasn't particularly glamorous, but it worked.
And somewhere along the way, curiosity had turned into something I wanted to understand properly.
Eventually, practising at home wasn't enough. I began taking classes myself, travelling mainly to Amsterdam, London and Berlin to study with different teachers and experience different approaches to Shibari.
I learned a great deal. But the more I learned, the more I also began to question.
Some of the established ways of teaching felt too rigid for what I was looking for. Tradition sometimes seemed to matter more than asking why something was done. Patterns and outcomes could take precedence over the process of getting there. And too often, I felt the person doing the tying became the protagonist of something that, to me, should always be a conversation between two people.
So, slowly, I began finding my own way.
I wanted rope to be less about reproducing the “right” shape and more about understanding what you're doing. Less about complexity for its own sake. More adaptable, more intuitive, and more attentive to the person in the rope.
And above all, I wanted it to remain something you could actually enjoy doing.
When I opened Subspace, teaching Shibari wasn't really the plan, but people kept asking me where they could learn. They were looking for classes in English, for somewhere they wouldn't feel intimidated by what they didn't know yet, and for an approach that felt accessible rather than unnecessarily complicated.
So I started teaching a simple introductory class.
The idea was modest: give people enough of a foundation that they could walk into classes elsewhere feeling more confident and prepared.
Except something unexpected happened.
People came back.
They wanted to learn more. And I realised that the approach I had developed for myself was exactly what many of them had been looking for too.
That's when teaching became part of Subspace.
As the classes grew, so did the way I taught them.
Rather than starting with a fixed curriculum, I listened to my students. I watched them practise. I noticed where they hesitated, what they picked up quickly, what confused them and, perhaps most importantly, what made them light up.
From there, I began building the programme around the way people actually learn.
The question was simple: how can I help someone learn as much as possible, as efficiently as possible, without taking the fun out of it?
That meant stripping away unnecessary complexity, making safety and comfort part of the learning process from the very beginning, and leaving plenty of room to experiment.
Over time, the classes became more structured, but the principle behind them never really changed.
In a way, my students taught me how to teach.
I still listen. I still observe. And the way I teach continues to evolve because of the people in the room.
And perhaps, that is where you come in.
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