Studio

Inside the studio

IveVex is a working studio before it is a shop. This page describes how the work is made, in what order, and under what rules - so that a collector knows what stands behind an edition number.

Creative philosophy

We make a small amount of work and finish it properly. A piece is released when it stops changing, not when a release calendar says so. Restraint is the house style: few colours, long exposures, deep blacks and one point of gold.

Three rules govern every release. Editions are capped before the first share is sold. Nothing is generated on demand. Nothing is described in the sales copy that is not visible in the file.

Design process

1 · Premise

A collection starts as a written premise - a constraint, a place, a material or an hour of the day. If the premise cannot be described in two sentences, it is not ready.

2 · Capture and composition

Source material is produced in-house: photography, scanned material, drawn elements and composited studies. We keep the original files.

3 · Colour and finish

Grading is done on calibrated displays against a printed reference so the digital file and any physical proof agree.

4 · Edition and issue

Edition count and shares per edition are fixed, the work is locked, and the release record - title, collection, date, edition size - is written before the piece appears on the site.

How collections are created

A collection is a group of works that answer the same premise. It is planned as a whole: how many pieces, how many editions per piece, how many shares per edition, and why those numbers. The rationale is published with the collection so the sizing is never arbitrary after the fact.

Once published, a collection is closed. We do not add pieces to a finished collection, and we do not increase edition counts in response to demand. If a collection sells out, it stays sold out.

Artist collaboration

How we work with external artists

Some collections are made with invited collaborators. Every collaboration is covered by a written agreement before work starts, setting out authorship, credit, edition sizing, licence scope and the revenue split. Collaborators are credited by name on the collection page and on the certificate for every edition they contributed to.

What we ask for

Original work only, with the collaborator warranting that they hold the rights to everything they supply. We license the work for release as a capped edition; the collaborator retains authorship of the underlying work.

Submissions

We review submissions in batches rather than continuously. Send a link to existing work and a short note to hi@ivevex.com. We reply to every submission we take forward; we cannot reply to all of them.

Archive and preservation

Master files, edition records and certificates are retained by the studio for as long as we are required to keep the associated accounting records, and in practice for the life of the studio. A certificate can be re-issued years later from the same record.