Amy's mum Clare, at home for International Women's Day and Mother's Day

March 15, 2026

This International Women's Day, we're celebrating the brilliant women whose work happens in our notebooks, with a series of 3 interviews. In a special Mother's Day edition to round off the series, we spoke to Clare Wright, the mother of Mark+Fold founder, Amy Cooper-Wright. Born in Glasgow in the 1950's, she tells us about the challenges she has faced as a woman architect, and shares her hopes for her granddaughters' generation.   How was it for you as a woman, training as an architect in the 1970s? When I was a student, there were hardly any women, and that meant we stood out. There was really some terrible behaviour when I was a young woman, and there was nothing you could do about it. I had a tutor, Isi Metzstein, who wasn't sexist at all, and I thrived with his tutelage. When I went into practice, I was the only woman in the office other than the secretaries. The guys kind of treated me like a pet or something. Once on a building site, I was having a cup of tea with a site agent and he said, "Clare, did you ever consider being a nurse?" and I said, "No, did you?" He said, "Don't be ridiculous!" So I pointed out that men can be nurses too and he said, "I would be very uncomfortable about having my daughter be an architect and be on a building site, because the men wear hardly any clothes." I said, "Well, I think they wear even less clothes if you're a nurse." What about returning to work after kids? That was hard, trying to go back into an architectural practice, and I didn't feel very confident having been away from it doing part-time teaching while the kids were small. I wasn't quite sure how I'd manage with the children. And in those days, people just asked in interviews. One firm said at interview, "We've never had anybody in the office with children before." And I said, "What, none of the men have children?" And he said, "Oh, no, the men have children!"  Can you tell us about a woman who inspired you? I was inspired by a woman called Joan Lardner. Joan was married to my dad's best friend. We went and stayed in Tremor in Ireland, where they lived, and she had eight children and she was an architect. Joan had short dark hair and she wore polo necks, a checked pencil skirt and flat shoes. Every morning she went off to Dublin and worked in an architect's office. She was very rare, in the late 60s, as a working mother, and in such a demanding job too. She designed her house, and you looked right out over this bay — I always thought that room was fabulous. Her charisma and her style, and the fact that she was confident about having children and having a really good career, and she made this amazing place — I only realised recently, but she inspired me to feel that all of that was possible. What do you hope will be different or better for your granddaughters? I hope my granddaughters can follow their hearts and do things that are deeply satisfying with their lives. I think things are changing — childcare is not falling so much onto women. I see the people in my office and my children with their partners, the childcare is shared much more evenly between men and women now. I hope my granddaughters can just be their true selves, whatever is their core. That they can be confident, that they can believe in themselves, and that they can be very happy doing it. I hope there aren't the same hurdles I had to clear, but at the same time, there will still be challenges, so I hope they'll have the inner strength to overcome them, and do what makes them happy — whatever that is. How do you use your notebooks? In my job it's very important to keep good records. I always draw a margin and include the date somewhere, because I may have to go back and say, "No, you did say that, actually." If I need to remember something I've committed to in a meeting, I always do a little circle with a star in it, and then afterwards I can go back and check what it was I said I'd do. I use them for drawing too — it's just such lovely paper. Sometimes the drawings are to explain ideas. The paper is good for all of those things, and it fits in any bag, so it comes everywhere with me.  I get great pleasure out of them. I bought the Glow Notebook recently and when I showed it to my son and his wife, they were so taken with it that I had to give it away. Then I had to give one to someone in the office, so I ended up buying four of them just so I got one for myself! What's are your earliest memories of paper? We didn't have paper for drawing at home. So I remember drawing in the backs of books. I would do it in pencil, and I did feel very bad about it, like I was defacing the book — but that's what I did, because we really just didn't have paper for drawing. At primary school, we sometimes did drawing on a Friday afternoon for an hour, and they would give you a piece of A5 paper with some stencils, which made it almost impossible to draw anything. Those are my first memories of paper. When it came to my own children, drawing and creativity were just part of our whole identity. We had a lot of scrap paper — things printed out in the office that we'd bring home as scrap, so the kids could draw on the back. Endless paper, reams of it! How do you feel about Amy starting a business, just as you did? I am so proud of her. When I set up my practice, it was with my partner, and I think it's easier when there are two of you (we now have two junior partners too). But Amy has done it on her own, and she set it up when her first child was one, and here we are ten years on. She manages to always be there for her children, and has built an incredibly successful creative business. I am most impressed by the level of research she does, her rigour (she gets that from her father). The detail she goes into, her application to really explore things, that whole commitment to getting the object just perfect.

Ehryn Torrell in her studio for International Women's Day

March 08, 2026

This International Women's Day, we're celebrating the brilliant women whose work happens in our notebooks, with a series of 3 interviews. We spoke to visual artist Ehryn Torrell, a London-based Canadian artist, about the barriers she has overcome as a woman artist and her hopes for the next generation of women.