BEDROOM
What I like to look at are spartan rooms with just the bed and a window. And books. And paintings. Not so minimal then. Not a cell but a home, with a view, with good light and a comfortable rug. And books. And if the books are not being read they are stacked to make a bedside table.
In the paper houses that I make, from scraps of heavy board and pages from old books, the rooms are full of random text, words ripped from their original meaning and pasted in an elsewhere room, where a tiny wooden clock chimes silently. Like the patchwork on display, everything is simple and timeless. Breakfast will be ready soon. Books are open. Drawers are neat. Above a chest is a portrait made from the shadow of my hand as it adjusts a tiny pillow.
**
KITCHEN
I peer into the paper houses I have created over the years and wonder why I have neglected to make detailed kitchen spaces. True, I have made kitchens with simple sinks and tables. But mostly I have focused on the main comfort, for me, which is a place to sit and read. I have spent hours and hours trying to fashion some kind of fireside chat.
My Granny’s kitchen is the space of my earliest memories. It was large with a table and all the mod-cons a seventies kitchen could afford. There was a hatch to feed plates through to the dining room. My sister and I, little urchins, played in the kitchen as our grandmother worked. When we were not dabbing our magic painting books with water, we played with a dolls house, a bungalow with a hinged roof. I suppose a bungalow was chosen for us because we were living in one. I don’t remember any furniture in this doll's house, only that we would be forever stuffing it full of things and slamming the roof shut. It is perhaps an impossible memory that we tried to put Granny’s dog in the doll’s house. That we trapped poor Whiskey (Highland terrier) and that he eventually freed himself only to bite our neighbour friend. But I know he bit her. I admit now we tormented that poor dog, with our need for affection and reaction, and eventually he disappeared, just as the doll’s house was most likely re-homed, just as people were made to vanish.
When I imagine making a miniature kitchen I think of yellow (Granny’s kitchen), chairs, aprons, Pyrex dishes, spoons, cupboards, bowls, scissors, tea cups, sink taps, windows full of sunlight, a table with legs chewed by a dog. I know that no attempt at making this space, using the modest materials I have to hand (cardboard, paper, glue, paint) will ever bring it to life in quite the way I want. But I have attempted to draw it a few times.
**
LIVING ROOM
When I build a home from scratch I will focus on the main comfort, for me, which is a place to sit and read. I have spent hours and hours trying to fashion some kind of fireside chat. I like to fashion fireplaces. Come sit by the fire on a chilly winter’s day and wonder how long it will be before the telephone rings, or a breeze plays with the hand stitched curtains.
When I began, more than ten years ago, to make miniature houses, I imagined the living room would be furnished in a bohemian, twentieth century style - like something you might find at the Charleston Farmhouse. That’s easier to imagine than put together on a really, really small scale. But I have tried over the years. Not to reproduce the Bloomsbury look exactly but to make something of my own.
Making these tiny homes is a way to inhabit spaces I would otherwise not inhabit or afford. I can put together a few cardboard walls and see beyond them, imagine elaborate details down to the skirting boards and up to the coloured glass lamps. Of course, I make and break rooms. I go off ideas because what is in my head is too elaborate or time consuming to create on a miniature scale. I have purchased vintage dolls house furniture and attempted to ‘customise’ only to ruin it, shamefully.
My obsession with creating tiny spaces has led, naturally, to making tiny paintings - very tiny paintings. And these obsessions together are very time consuming but delightful to me to work on. The idea that other tiny homes in other parts of the world now contain tiny paintings makes me happy.
In a way the paper houses I have made are an extension of my sketchbooks. Some are more defined than others. There has to be a certain incompleteness to make them interesting for me. There has to be the unsaid as well as the illustrated, a sense that time is not captured but forever slipping away, or folded into the curtains.
To live in a room is to spread your possessions about knowing you will return to them, if not today then soon. Doll’s houses, those without occupants, are displays of the moment just before the inhabitants return. Any moment now the dust will fly as someone comes and lifts a chair to sit nearer the window and read. Someone else will appear, placing just the right flowers in the vase on the mantle. In just a moment tea will be served. A cat will come in through the open window and make itself into a rug-shape by the fire.
In other, more familiar scenarios, the living space is taken over by art or craft making. Of course this is something that happens. Tables are covered with papers and books. At any moment now there will be the chaos of creativity. The sigh of a glue bottle. The hush of concentration as bits of fabric litter a rug.
UNDER THE STAIRS
I have attempted to make staircases and have failed, oh failed. I have spent hours juggling with bits of concertina-ed paper and strips of masking tape. I have imagined and admired spiral staircases, simple footbridges. I find doll’s houses with storeys that do not have stairs deeply disturbing. There has to be, at the very least, a hole for a ladder. In future building projects I would like to conquer my poor building skills and have stairs, mostly so that I can have a cupboard under the stairs that might be just a doorway to a scullery, study, root or wine cellar. Or could possibly lead to a secret library.
BATHROOM
A bathroom is less interesting for me to build in miniature. And perhaps it is no surprise then that I rarely if ever paint or sketch bathroom scenes. As much as I admire Bonnard’s work, I have never much cared for his figures that have just hopped out of the bath. There is something awkward about it - the female form is posing - not in a prudish way, it just doesn’t spark inspiration. So I rarely build bathroom spaces in the houses I imagine, or stick together. Instead, I can suggest bathing activities etc.. happen in another part of the house not seen (or built yet). Maybe one day I will find a wonderful iron bath, sixteenth scale, and that will spark my interest in making miniscule tiles….
EXTERIOR
The outside of a house can suggest as little or as much as you like, when you are making it from scratch and have enough glue. Building these mobile homes, having them perched about my home, has allowed me to use them for reference in paintings, to re-imagine ideas that drift and fade. I can take a paper house into the garden and photograph it. They are props and still life moments in a world of rapid change. For this reason I like to make the exteriors simple and friendly enough, without attempting to be too real about it. I don’t wish to make toy-ish objects, but instead hope that what I might have are reminders of a home I’ll never truly know.
DOOR TO THE GARDEN - footnote
I wish I had had more time to take photographs, new photos for this essay. Alas, time has run away this week (and I have had to evacuate a swarm of ants from my actual kitchen!) I will, however, endeavour to share more recent photos in the future.
(note: the title of this essay is inspired by the song Still Life In Mobile Homes by Japan - a favourite band from the eighties).
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always, ALWAYS, an experience and a delight to follow your narrative through your creative process! i found myself wanting to place the vase of flowers on the mantle and perhaps to open the window for the cat…. stacks of books are endlessly intriguing, whether in a house or painting of your imagination or in an actual room— book selection helps us to know each other on a more intimate level. i admire how you have been able to use your imagination and personal reflections to make a living and how you always manage to keep things fresh and in motion. your scope seems unlimited. 💚