I like having a ‘private’ studio – one where people don’t have to walk through to use the kitchen or toilet.
Natural light is good too.
Set myself a week project to get started. After arriving with nothing I’m starting to gather materials, and realising how well I know where to get things in London.
I also bought some coffee, milk and a simple radio ….
Week 1 project;
Second–hand dinner plates
Glitter
Wall mounted dinner plates covered in blue and/or silver glitter …
I need to find the right adhesive. The ceramic glue I used today isn’t right – I can’t spread it evenly and I think it is designed for repairing broken china, so it’s some kind of contact adhesive.
Glitter is very expensive here – I’m tempted to see how much it would cost to order it online and have it sent here. (I found glitter from a UK supplier in Rochdale in one shop – I don’t know where I thought glitter came from but I didn’t expect to find glitter from northern England on the shelf of a Stockholm hobby shop.)
I thought of dinner-plates months, if not years, ago. But I didn’t know what to do with them. Yesterday I went to a big charity shop and bought some. This morning I picked up the Paul Auster novel I’ve brought with me, and read a passage about the central character and his granddaughter …
“Inanimate object, she said
What about them? I asked
Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions. …
Remember the dishes in Grand Illusion?
The dishes?”
Auster describes a scene ‘right near the end’ of the film when the woman washes the dishes after possibly the last meal with the man she loves, her daughter and her loves friend. The man and his friend need to escape the troops that are closing in, they run off through the woods.
“… every other director in the world would have stayed with them until the end of the film. But not Renoir. He has the genius – and when I say genius, I mean the understanding, the depth of heart, the compassion – to go back to the woman and her little daughter, this young woman who has already lost her husband to the madness of the war, and what does she have to do? She has to go back into the house and confront the dining room table and the dirty dishes from the meal they’ve just eaten. The men are gone now, and because they’re gone those dishes have been transformed into a sign of their absence, the lonely suffering of women when men go off to war, and one by one, without saying a word, she picks up the dishes and clears the table. How long does the scene last? Ten seconds? Fifteen seconds? No time at all, but it takes your breath away, doesn’t it?”
I’m not cleaning my dishes, I’m glittering them …
