On April 8, 1947, workman Artie Matthews found the body of Langley Collyer just 10 feet from where Homer died. His partially decomposed body was being eaten by rats. A suitcase and three huge bundles of newspapers covered his body. Langley had been crawling through their newspaper tunnel to bring food to his paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps fell down and crushed him. Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later. The stench detected on the street had been emanating from Langley, the younger brother
The Victorian Schoolhouse where I live and work is composed of years of remnants shoring up upon one another. It has rising damp and ‘Jews Ear’ growing in it. It has four shaved corners to prevent children hurting themselves on the sharp red brick provides home for masonry bees. Under my sweet and chocolate wrapper wallpaper commemorating Christmas, Easter and birthdays, the sulphur yellow of the walls shows through from the 1960s, the Beryl blue of the 1950s beneath that. Darwin described the shadows of the glaciers he saw in Tierra del Fuego as Beryl Blue; a reference to Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours a visual taxonomy of colours, which he had on board the Beagle. This colour was divided into animal, vegetable and mineral with a colour that corresponded to each of these categories: the same colour as the beauty spot on wing of Teal drake Celandine magaritaria as well of course as the mineral Beryl. (Photographer Arnaud Mags’ Nomenmclature)
The roots of the elder tree erupt through the concreted playground two collared doves live there. Where the boys played football there are the careful Andre brick sculptures of the builders yard. Different piles for different colours: from the lowest temperature it takes to cook a brick to the highest: familiar cinnabar red, purple, peat brown and black.
A split door previously belonging to queen’s cousin David Ogilvie’s, from his house in the Peter Pan holiday haven, with its islands and mere-house in the clouds water tower. Thorpeness rests upon a filigree ironwork bed frame, a defunct fridge houses the smaller tools: spanners, trowels, mortar boards. A rich man: a folly money could help philanthropic and hospitals-a folly. (Barbara Jones)
Inside the schoolhouse there is a hoarding of finds in islands-inlets. Out of this encyclopaedic collection of lost objects of jumbled chronological strata’s: a mythical map of the people and their stories. Out of the pile comes life-creative source material to- impose a narrative onto nonsensical and disjointed memories and emotions.
“The storytellers have not realised that the Sleeping Beauty would have awoken covered in a thick layer of dust; nor have they envisaged the sinister spiders’ webs that would have been torn apart at the first movement of her re tresses. Meanwhile dismal sheets of dust constantly invade earthly habitations and uniformly defile them: as if it were a matter of making ready attics and old rooms for the imminent occupation of the obsessions, phantoms, spectres that the decayed odour of old dust nourishes and intoxicates.” Bataille
In October of 2003, the Spurlock Museum accepted a donation of a WWII silk map from Barbara Nelson. This map will fit very well into the Museum’s military collections as well as into the extensive map collection. Barbara received the map from her father who served in WWI. He in turn received the map from her Uncle who served and acquired the map during the Battle of the Bulge in WWII.
This map is made of silk and is printed on both sides. One side is of France, Germany and Switzerland. The other side is of Belgium and Germany. The map shows elevation, roads, railways, bodies of water and towns.
Back of Map
Silk maps were originally created by Christopher Clayton Hutton who worked for the British Military Intelligence. These new silk maps could be hidden and stood up very well to the elements in the field. The United States began to produce its own silk maps after November of 1942 after a meeting with the British Intelligence. The maps were a great asset in assisting POWs escape.
Roger Cardinal, Art Historian and the man who coined the phrase ‘Outsider Artist’ sent me a new year email today in it he told me “I read the other day that Alberto Giacometti used to keep a vixen in his Paris studio, but that it ran away on the very day he got back from Switzerland after the war.”
