Monday, July 11, 2011

Love This House.



I have fallen in love with this house currently featured at The Selby. A 1960s bungalow in Auckland, New Zealand belonging to karen inderbitzen-walller and delphine avril planqueel. It makes such a nice change from what serves as my usual interiors eye candy which is often too perfect and over styled -  to the point of wondering if any body actually lives there. Check these pics out and you'll see what I mean - there is no question somebody lives here. I only wish I could go hang out there with the owners, having a cuppa on that old yellow settee in that sun room and then a long leisurely trawl through their nick knacks, book shelves and magazine collection...


Go here to see the lot including the amazing pink kitchen, bed cover made from a vintage girdle collection and a back yard you can see yourself having a picnic in. Happy viewing!








Saturday, July 9, 2011

Blossoms In The Dark Heart Of July.



Earlier this week was one of the bleakest days this place has to offer. Dark, bitterly cold and inhospitable. The best place to be was home and in bed. And I would have stayed there but for the pressing need for groceries and scripts waiting to be filled. So off to the shops it was. And that's where I found these blossoms - incongruously in bloom on this darkest of days. Amazing! I know this row of trees and that they do bloom out of season every year but this early? Just as we make our slide into the coldest most inhospitable month? I had no choice but to get my trusty camera out and exercise my amateur photography skills...

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Sculpture Gone Surreal.




 


         
    
Ifanyone remembers my efforts earlier this year at sculpting my own head  - with exact measurements - and plenty of struggle along the way (getting each degree of 360 accurate was a headache - no pun intended!) then this is what became of Part Two - abstracting the finished head in line with an art movement or some other element of inspiration. I chose Surrealism because I wanted to explore a recurrent dream I'd been having about houses - dreams where I 'd be in a familiar house that would suddenly reveal itself to have an unfamiliar room, doorway, hall etc. There were many variations but the constant was a sense of discovery. Sometimes it was disturbing. Sometimes it was exhilarating. I'd expressed this a while before in some of my illustrations, finding that my figures were ending up with houses atop their heads. It's a classic dream I suppose but what I didn't know while I was doing this part of the sculpture was of an amazing exhibition that had taken place in London at the Barbican about a year ago called The Surreal House which explored the relationship between Surrealism and the House - something I had naively been unaware of and thought was MY connection!!!!!
Hardly. The Surrealist Declaration of 1926 states: 
We have no intention of changing men's habits but we have hopes of proving to them how fragile their               thoughts are and on what cellars they have erected their unsteady houses.
The house was the Surrealists preferred metaphor for the psyche and unconscious as well as holding much  symbolism for Freud who put this to great use in his psychoanalysis.Once I had discovered the Barbicon exhibition and all the traditional connections between the house and Surrealism the exercise became so much richer. I ended up getting a lot out of it and maybe even decoded my own 'house' a bit along the way. Particularly fun was making the new eyeballs to reside in my 'unconscious' house and creating the 'blind spot' in the consciousness! The only down side? I've stopped having the dream.
PS A fantastic 30 second video for the Barbican exhibition is on You tube and worth watching here. It so wonderfully captures the eerie place of the house in dreams.