Chariots, carriages and coaches have been integral to ponies’ lives ever since ponies became ponies – they are of immense help in tilling fields, transporting ponies and inanimate objects around, serving as an everyday item to demonstrate certain concepts in special relativity, blah blah blah. They also happen to train whoever’s harnessed to be more patient and determined: too slow and dissatisfied passengers buck the apparatus, too fast around sharp corners and everything disintegrates. Yet their operating mechanisms epitomise simplicity and robustness, just two or four wheels on a box linking up to harness with no explanation or manual required; their construction has therefore evolved into an ubiquitous profession moving with the times, both in techniques employed and visual style.

I am one of those carriage-makers – even within that diaspora multiple terms exist – and while still an apprentice with errands to run I chanced upon an issue of De Stijl, an Utrecht magazine that was transforming Dutch art on an unprecedented scale. In place of lengthy tudes on visual elements and historical periods were arbitrary arrangements of thick and thin black lines demarcating red, yellow and blue fields. They resisted comprehension at first but I reconciled with this Nieuwe Beelding, especially after reading some articles about a like-minded school called Bauhaus, and fell in love. Right in working memory floated the perfect carriage, stripped and reduced in complexity so it became nothing… nothing but a carriage. Hence my cutie mark’s origin, after the ponies testing this novel design of mine quipped “we feel like we’re flying even though we’re clearly not”.