- Art is everywhere.

It might be a painting in your friend's living room, or one on a passing train.

Maybe it's a ring on your finger, or even the one on your phone, because art is incorporated into almost everything, and we're excited to explore that everything with you.

Welcome to "Art Inc".

In this episode, we're going to explore the senses.

- [Narrator] If you want to know what's going on... (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (static crackling) - Let's get salty in Newport and find out how it gets from the reef to the table.

(upbeat music) (water gurgling) ("Casa Monte Negra") ("Casa Monte Negra" continues) ♪ Let's take a ride ♪ ♪ I've got the perfect place in mind ♪ ♪ We've got an hour or so to hide ♪ ♪ Monte Negra love of mine ♪ - [Matt] I like to say making sea salt is like, it's like a balance, it's like an art and science.

♪ Just one more bend ♪ ♪ Let's find a brook or stream my friend ♪ - I am Matt Mullins.

- And I'm Tami Mullins.

- And we are the co-owners of Newport Sea Salt.

♪ Cares if we're a little late again ♪ - I was a naval officer for 20 years.

We were stationed over in Naples, Italy, I worked for NATO.

And while we lived in Naples, Italy, we really fell into the food culture there, which is not hard to do.

Eat what's local, eat what's fresh, eat what's in season.

So we really started learning to appreciate the use of sea salt, which we had never really done before.

So, that sort of, that mentality of eating local, really good ingredients, but sourced locally, kind of, you know, sat with us well, and we took that back to America with us, back to Newport.

(bright music) We were very surprised we couldn't find local sea salt considering we're living in Newport, which is an island.

Rhode Island is the Ocean State, and nobody in the state was making sea salt.

So, we kind of had this little light bulb moment, like, I wonder if a little sea salt company would work well here in Newport, in Rhode Island?

We source our ocean water from Brenton Reef area because it's fast moving ocean water, it's just beautiful.

It's like a swimming pool out there.

And then we transport it here to Hope & Main, where we spend the entire day making sea water into sea salt.

- [Interviewer] Is that easy work?

- Is it easy work?

No, it's work, it's definitely not easy, but it's a labor of love to turn, you know, 140 gallons of ocean water to sea salt can take, you know, nine hours.

We like to say there's two phases.

There's a boiling phase and then there's a slow simmer phase.

With the boiling phase, we use steam kettles that bring all the water up to a boil.

And during that process, it's literally the fresh water that's being evaporated, the minerals, the sea salt, you know, remain behind.

And then there's a certain point in time that we'll shift gears and will transfer the water to our shallow evaporating pans.

When you're evaporating sea water, there's a certain window that we're looking for, where the actual sea salt comes out of solution.

When it starts forming on the surface, it looks like ice, and then little crystals will float and dance around.

They'll eventually become denser than the water it's sitting on, and they'll just sink to the bottom.

And you let that go for many hours and you let the salt build up, and then that's time to scoop it out and see how we did.

(laughs) - [Interviewer] Is salt beautiful?

- Is salt beautiful?

Sure.

Oh, they're almost like snowflakes.

Each are somewhat different in a way, but moreso where the salt, or I should say, where the water is sourced from, the trace minerals will differ from location to location.

Salt is all sodium chloride, yes, but the trace minerals from location to location will differ, and therefore giving it a different flavor.

(bright music) At the farmer's markets, we get a lot of return customers who take our salt if they're gonna visit someone, or going to go to someone's house.

- They're traveling to Greece to go see family, they're going to France.

- And they like to bring a bit of Rhode Island, a bit of, you know, and take that with them, 'cause it truly is a flavor of, you know, Rhode Island, flavor of Newport.

- You know, it's something that we work on so hard together, that to be able to bring it to a market or share it with our customers is pretty amazing, you know?

Because it's ours, you know, we made it, we crafted it with our two hands, so.

Four hands.

(laughs) - [Matt] And we're kind of honored that- - Very honored, yeah.

- We get that a lot, where people do take our salt.

- They're taking our sea salt and they're sharing our story.

You know, they're that connection, so it's really, it's really cool, so yeah.

- Yeah.

(laughs) - Yeah.

Are we good?

Okay.

(laughs) - [Interviewer] Okay, that's perfect.

(upbeat music) - Let's take a ferry ride to the only operational fiber mill in Rhode Island and learn what makes their yarn world class.

(gentle music) - It's very peaceful, it's calming, there's so many colors, there's so many inspirational points, whether it's the rocks in the ocean or the meadows and the rolling hills.

Block Island is 50% conserved, so there's easements all over, so there are nature trails and walks everywhere.

It's a lovely place to be.

And knitting's on top of that.

We really enjoy making things.

We enjoy creating things.

We design a lot of garments.

We design felting kits, we design yarn, and that is really fun to us.

We believe in a color array.

We have oranges, we have marigolds, things like that.

They don't really sell very much because most people won't make an orange sweater or something, but they will use that as a highlight or they will use it as a trim.

Very early on in our company, we worked with another yarn company that helped us, a great mentor, and we went and showed her our color palette, and she basically shook her head and said, "You will fail.

Half your colors will never sell."

And she just started killing colors.

And she goes, "Those are the colors that'll be successful."

And I said to her, I said, "Well, that's true, so therefore let's not make a lot of those colors, but let's offer them."

Between Karen and Laura and myself, we come up with what we think are fun palettes.

(whimsical music) First thing we do is get the fiber.

We use fiber from the farm here.

As animals get older, much like our hair, things get a little stiffer, a little bit more brittle, not quite as drapey and pliable.

So we use all the fiber from the farm in products that don't need softness, they don't need drape.

So, needle felting or, you know, fun little toys and crafts.

For all the yarn, we bring fiber, and we believe we bring the best fiber in the world.

So, over the years, we have now figured out how to get Mongolian cashmere, we get wool from the US, and we get wool from the Falkland Islands, which is off Argentina, where the sheep are in with the penguins, it's very windy, it's a different grass, and it's a perfect fiber environment.

And we source it for the best designs of our yarn.

Then we dye it.

Most mills, when they make any kind of garment, will bleach the fiber to get it to a normative state, and then they dye on top of that.

We don't do that, we like working with the natural colors and then build from there.

We then bring the fiber up and we pick it because once you wash it, it gets clumpy, and we wanna open it up.

And so picking is really just a sense of lofting and opening up the fiber.

From there, we cart it.

Carting is where you take confused fiber and you stretch them out.

Then they will get further and further aligned.

And we also then blend the substrates like cotton and wool.

We then also blend colors, and this is really important for what we do.

Blue and white gets you sky or get you some variant of sky.

We can add different colors in.

We'll blend black and white.

And rather than dying gray, we think the combination of the black and the white together is a much more intriguing color.

So when you actually look at the yarn very, very closely, you'll see black fiber, white fiber, black fiber, but the minute you walk away, you can't discern that.

The output of a carter is called a slimer.

We then put that in a draw frame and the output is called a roving.

From there, we then spin it.

So it's creating a single ply of yarn, and this is called the draft.

So you're drafting fibers out.

So, if I keep taking this, see how big this is, but how fine that is?

That's all about selecting, you know, basically selecting fibers out to create that single ply.

If I let go of this, it'll all unwind, right?

So all I did was spin one direction.

We then ply three of these together, but we ply in the opposite direction.

Yarn, rope, wire always wants to come undone, so it's trying to unwind, but it can't.

We then steam it, and steaming the yarn is sort of like walking into a sauna on a stressful day, right?

You just relax, everything gets much better.

And here it's the same thing.

So it's called resetting the twist.

So, that twist and spin and the balance with a ply now become, in theory, harmonious.

We really worked hard to make the best yarns possible.

And it was a lofty goal.

It was sort of a silly goal, right?

But what's been fascinating the last few years is how many designers love working with our yarn.

How many designers want to work with our yarn or come here to teach a retreat.

And we have sort of reached the status, which is a real compliment, to what our overall goal was.

And one of those goals was to make Block Island a yarn or knitting fiber destination.

Funny enough, three months ago, we had to find a new teacher for our May retreat, and we reached out to a world class designer, and I said, "Laura, can you come?

You know, we need you quickly.

Can you come?"

And she goes, "Sven, I'll be there.

Block Island, teaching on Block Island is on my knitting bucket list."

And that's a really nice thing, when designers and the industry really want to be here.

I think it really comes down to creativity.

It comes down to fostering the creativity in all of us.

Whether that's in knitting, whether that's in painting, or whether it's in crochet or weaving, or that's in glass blowing.

And you may say, oh, is really making yarn art, or is designing the finished good art?

Well, I'd say both.

- When you think about the perfect cup of tea, do you imagine what it smells like or where it grows?

Or maybe you imagine the ritual of making that perfect cup of tea.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - We're looking for that memory that we kind of lost after we immigrated here.

So I wanted to create this for my parents so that, you know, they're able to find a sense of comfort in the city that we immigrated to.

But what this turned into is much bigger than I could have ever imagined.

My name is Michelle Chin.

I am the owner and founder of Ceremony Cafe.

I think the most important thing about a tea ceremony is you're taking time out of your busy schedule.

You are enjoying something that could literally take, you know, a minute to 30 seconds to do on your own at home, but you made the effort in, you know, cutting away all of that distraction.

Literally watching the tea brew, you are appreciating, you know, something that's almost like a lost form of art.

I worked for a textile company when I was living in New York, and I had the experience of going overseas, looking at factories, and importing textile.

(upbeat music) Every time I would go back to China, my parents would ask me to bring an empty suitcase, and that empty suitcase was strictly for tea.

So I would bring back, you know, teas that they're familiar with that we can't find here locally.

When my mom and I were, you know, younger, she was such a fashionista.

We come from a very small town in China, but I remember she would be one of the first ones who would tell me it doesn't matter what brand of product you buy, it matters what quality it is.

So we take that same idea that I had growing up and what I learned from the fashion world, and apply to how I curate the store here.

(upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) I personally think you can't put a price on art, a piece of art that you love.

And when it comes to tea, to me, that's the kind of relationship I have with tea and my tea farmers.

(gentle music) A lot of these tea farmers in Asia these days, they are very machine driven, which is not to say that it's not quality.

However, there is a sense of art that goes into making everything by hand, producing everything by hand, and I feel like there's no price tag you can put on that.

Drinking tea to me is more of a way to find, you know, some time to get away in my busy schedule as a mom and a business woman.

So to me, it's finding my own little serene world.

For others, I would say this is something that they are developing.

They see that it's not something that you have to be so formal about, you can just do this, take 10 minutes out of your day every morning, and perform a tea ceremony for yourself.

They're incorporating that into their daily life, which is such a beautiful thing to watch.

(upbeat music) - Let's meet a local perfumer whose fragrances strike all the right notes, a perfect blend of art, science, and all natural alchemy.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) So, is natural perfumery an art, science, alchemy?

How would you describe it?

- I would say it's all three.

I would definitely classify it as an art, because for me, it's a creative endeavor.

The fact that I'm an independent, small, you know, niche perfumer means that I pretty much get to do what I want and tell stories through my fragrances, which is what I do.

(smooth music) - So you're not just a perfumer, you're kind of like a fragrance guide.

- A little bit, and people definitely need it more when smelling natural perfume, because they're not used to natural smells anymore.

Our entire life is surrounded with synthetic fragrances, from our laundry detergent to our hair products or whatever.

- Everything smells fresh, too.

- They might think they don't like something, but they've never smelled the natural version of it, so it's really like kind of an educational process.

(perfume spray hissing) - [Narrator] The essence of precious scents caught at that precise moment of fulfillment, distilled with exquisite artistry for your every mood.

To be lovely is to feel lovely, when your fragrance expresses your gayest self.

- Perfume is a very mysterious art, but when you kind of pull back the curtain and look at the ingredients, there's three categories, top notes, heart notes, or middle notes, they mean the same thing, and base notes.

And when you're formulating a perfume, you wanna try to choose ingredients from all three categories.

Top notes are what you smell first.

So in natural perfumery, top notes tend to be citrus, spice, herbs, things like that.

Heart notes are what they sound like, they form the heart of the fragrance.

And so heart notes are almost always flowers.

And then base notes are things like woods and resins, you know, vanilla, patchouli, frankincense, vetiver, things like that.

So, to formulate a well-balanced perfume, you wanna have ingredients from all three categories so they kind of seamlessly transform into each other and wear that way.

So it really is kind of telling a story on the skin.

- Fragrance is really magical.

I really love the magic of what fragrance does for me and how it can make me feel.

- I think the magic of fragrance is related to memory and the strong tie that our sense of smell has with our memories.

I grew up, my mom likes to call it a farm, in New Hampshire, but it's really more of like a commune situation.

She doesn't like when I say that.

- Were you inspired by the smells of that lifestyle?

- Yeah, I think I was.

I spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid.

I collected acorns and, you know, so I was kind of that type of kid.

So I was always familiar with natural smells and kind of drawn to nature.

(upbeat music) - You're doing natural fragrances, but it feels like a beautiful, elegant boutique in here.

- Thank you.

Yes, my goal is to ditch the past hippiness (laughs) and embrace a more modern style of natural perfumery.

- Mm.

Smells so good.

(upbeat music) Sometimes it's the smell of salt air or the elegant fragrance of rose.

Sometimes it's a soft scarf or a beautiful blossom opening inside a teapot.

Art is all of these things and more, because wherever we find ourselves, we'll find art.

Thanks for joining us, and we'll catch you next time on "Art Inc".

- [Narrator] If you want to know what's going on... (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (static crackling)