I loved Heidi's post last week about her lifelong obsession with Interior Design. It made me think about my journey into this field. My career background used to be firmly entrenched in art history….and then I had four children and our home became my outlet for experimentation in interior decorating, collecting and display…..and mess eradication and attempted organisation. Last year, 12 years after I'd kissed goodbye to tertiary study and teaching Art Theory at the UTAS Art School, I had a brief foray back there to complete a unit on 'Contemporary Art for Collectors'. Part of our assessment centred on finding something unexpected at home and using it as a springboard to put together our own idiosyncratic 'dream collection' of art and objects…..this was how mine ended up.
'Say hello to my Le
Creuset French Oven:
I use this pot every day in the course of fulfilling my
domestic duties. It sits on top of my cooker, ever ready to help me whip up a
nourishing meal for my family, that my children will eat rather than throw. As
you can see from the patina encrusted onto the enamel, over the years it has
assisted with myriad meals - from the bland: repetitive before school breakfast
porridge to the extraordinary: complicated and labour intensive cassoulet with
duck confit and homemade pork sausage to the downright disappointing: I once
attempted broccoli soufflé a la Nigella, four times and on each try it failed
to rise and I was reduced to floods. My husband ended up declaring a moratorium
on the soufflé.
I bought my pot
back in 2002 (the year the Winter Olympics were held in Salt Lake City, the
Queen Mother died and ‘A Beautiful Mind’ won the Oscar for Best Picture) as a
souvenir of a trip to France in a quincaillerie, those Aladdin’s Caves which
stock everything from hardware to kitchenalia and everything in between. I had
to fast talk my husband into it’s purchase as he knew that it would be
difficult to pack and heavy to lug all the way home to Hobart yet he conceded. Since
then, I have subsequently acquired three additional Le Creuset French Ovens of
various sizes all bought in downtown Hobart.
I love the memory
that the first meal that I ever cooked in this pot was on a canal boat in
Burgundy. On days when I’m not frantically rushing to make dinner, accompanied
by the maelstrom of whatever else is going down in my kitchen, and allow myself
a moment to mentally float away from the banality of everyday domestic
drudgery, just looking at this pot transports me to that magical place that for
me is France. Summed up best by the novelist Nancy Mitford who wrote ‘The day
one sets foot in France, you can take it from me, PURE happiness begins….every
minute of the day here is bliss & when I wake up in the morning, I feel as
excited as if it were my birthday’. I know exactly what she’s talking about.
Le Creuset have
been producing enameled cast iron pots in their foundry at Fresnoy le Grand in
France since 1925 and they have been using the same hand crafted techniques in
their manufacture ever since. The ‘cocotte’ or French Oven was one of the first
cast iron items produced by the company and it is still the most popular being sold
in more than 60 countries around the world today. Le Creuset pour molten
materials, including pig iron, between two sand moulds, to form the pot, which
are then broken once cooled. This means that no two pots are ever exactly the
same.
Le Creuset’s
signature colour is ‘Volcanic’ aka orange. I left those ones on the shelf and
actively chose the blue. That blue even became a colour in the Le Creuset
palette is thanks to the English cookery writer Elizabeth David:
She who in the
grey days post WWII when the British public were half starved after strict rationing
and downright bad food captured their imaginations and appetites with descriptions
of the mouth watering food of the Mediterranean. It was Elizabeth David who suggested to Le Creuset that
they should spray their enamel pots the same blue as the blue on the Gauloises
cigarette packet:
And they did.
Le Creuset French
Ovens are on display in a museum in what is arguably the most famous kitchen in
the world….and it’s not in either France or Britain. It’s in the USA, at the Smithsonian
in Washington DC and it was the actual kitchen that was in the home of best
selling cook book author and cooking show host, The French Chef herself, Julia
Child who donated her kitchen to the museum, while she was still alive. Her own
Le Creuset French Oven still sits on the cooker. See for yourself:
Julia Child's actual kitchen on display at the Smithsonian
My Le Creuset pot anchors
me firmly in the domestic, in the intimate domain which is my home, in the
realm of the everyday which for me is carried out in Hobart. Yet it is so much
more, as it’s imbued with magical escapist connotations.
When I was describing
the connection between our blue Le Creuset pots and an iconic French cigarette
packet, my 13 year old daughter had no idea what I was talking about (phew).
She said that that particular shade of blue reminded her of Van Gogh’s stellar
work ‘The Starry Night’ that rhythmic symphony of swirling broken blue
brushstrokes. She’s right, isn’t she:
Van Gogh 'The Strarry Night' 1889 MOMA NY
So, surely there’s no better place to kickstart
my dream collection than with Le Creuset blue, which is so very evocative of
the South of France, as you can see ….Van Gogh in St Remy de Provence, Derain
in Collioure:
Andre Derain, ‘Boats at Collioure’ 1905 Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf
and Monet in Antibes:
Claude Monet, ‘Antibes seen from La Salis’ 1888 Toledo Museum of Art Ohio
As Monet himself wrote ‘It’s so beautiful
here, so clear, so luminous! One swims in blue air….It’s so clear, so pure of
pink and blue…..’.
So, from the
shameless covetousness of such big name works depicting France, my collection now
crosses continents to the other side of the world and relocates to Tasmania
because while I love France, this is where I call home. The artwork that
already hangs on my walls is predominately scenes of the Tasmanian landscape rendered by contemporary, local artists. How could I not add work by John Glover. Especially as this work
‘Hobart Town Taken from the Garden Where I lived in 1832’ is the portrait of a
house, down the road from my own, which 180 years after this depiction, I’ve
actually set foot in.
John Glover, ‘Hobart Town Taken from the Garden
Where I lived’ 1832 State Library of NSW Sydney
Patricia, who used to live there, gave me her recipe for
quince fruit mince, which I made, in my Le Creuset pot, last year for
Christmas. I’m interested in the portrayal of this fledgling urban environment,
which was colonial Hobart Town, the almost still recognizable landmarks and how
Glover, as a very recent English immigrant, has dealt with what must have been
very strange and foreign scenery. He said himself that he hoped to encounter in
Australia ‘a new and beautiful world – new landscapes, new trees, new flowers,
new animals and birds’. And this is what
he’s painting here.
I’ve already explained
how sometimes my pot can be a portal into another world. I’m not the first
person to long for getting away from the everyday. It reminds me of Marie
Antoinette, that ill fated Queen of France who lived in the gilded cage that
was Versaille, only to end up imprisoned, isolated from her children and decapitated
on the guillotine:
Louise Elisabeth
Vigee Le Brun, ‘Marie Antoinette’ 1779 Palace of Versailles
In the Hameau de la Reine at Versailles, she created one of the most intriguing
escapes of all in a far flung corner of the chateau’s grounds. She fled the oppressive
formality of court life, where she took her meals in front of the court, was
put to bed in front of the court and even gave birth in front of the court (imagine!) to
dress up as a milkmaid and play at being a peasant. The hamlet, was a rustic
village complete with a barn, lighthouse, farmhouse and a dairy – think Wendy
House fit for a queen:
Hameau de la Reine,
1783, designed Richard Mique, grounds of Versailles, France
Here, she could milk a cow, churn butter and afterwards
drink milk from this Sevres ‘Nipple Cup known as the breast bowl’. It made her
happy.
Now let me
introduce Dora Carrington:
Dora Carrington 1917
A sometime lesbian who had a heterosexual marriage yet
was totally and utterly in love with the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey. They set
up a ménage a trois in 1924 at Ham Spray house in the Wiltshire countryside.
Carrington was utterly content here, the furthest thing on her mind was escape, in
fact she was agonized as to how she could keep this household made up of such
disparate personalities, which hung together by a thread, together. To try and
create the perfect domestic environment, she decorated their home with no other
thought than to make Lytton happy and keep him amused.
Bedroom Ham Spray House c1924
Her paintbrush worked
it’s magic on tiles, furniture, freizes and a trompe l’oeil bookcase featuring
such titles as 'Deception' by Jane Austen and 'The Empty Room' by Virginia Woolf,
they were Bloomsburies after all. Her paintings of flowers, friends and places hung
on the walls:
Dora Carrington, ‘Flowers in a Two Handled Vase’ 1925 private collection UK
Carrington was so devoted to Lytton and their home life at Ham Spray
that when he died of cancer she was utterly distraught. She couldn’t imagine her
life without him and shot herself in the head with a rifle. She was 39.
So, I’m still
thinking about the home and domesticity and moving on to look at the work of Tracy Emin. The home is an intimate
space and within it’s walls perhaps the most private room of all is the
bedroom. Here is Tracey Emin’s work ‘My Bed’. (Heidi and Faux Fuchsia look away now)!
Tracey
Emin, ‘My Bed’ 1998 private collection, UK
Made, and I use the term loosely,
in 1998 when Emin was living in council flat in Waterloo. This is her own bed –
the detritus of stained sheets, used condoms, blood stained knickers and empty
bottles of alcohol testimony to a weekend spent in it. I’m ashamed to admit
that it makes me itch to clean it all up, put it in the washing machine and
replace it with spotless vacuumed floors and clean sheets.
Finally, the last
work is by contemporary Thai - Australian video artist Kawita Vatanajyankur. It really called my name. While this
is a brightly coloured, manipulated representation of domesticity it captures
the repetitive, thankless nature of the work and how, some days it feels to do
it:
Kawita Vatanajyankur, ‘The Robes’ 2014
So, regardless of
the fact that I’d love a palace on the Grand Canal in Venice a la Peggy
Guggenheim or a row of purpose designed town houses in London like those of
John Soane, I think that my dream collection would loose it’s reason for being,
which, seeing it is based entirely on my own personal whim and fantasy can only
be housed and displayed in my own home…..in Hobart. While the Sevres Nipple Cup can go into
the cupboard with our Wedgwood dinner set, and Tracey Emin’s ‘My
Bed’ can go into one of the upstairs bedrooms….well it did once reside in
Charles Saatchi’s own home, the main problem is that I’d run out of wall space
to display this amazing collection of
paintings. So, I’ll steal the idea found in John Soane’s own home’s
design for a picture gallery and have one made to custom fit our living room.
The Picture Gallery at Sir John Soane’s Museum London
Then I can curate the hang and the fold back walls and mix and match works as
mood dictates – fancy coming over for a cup of milk?'
After the presentations, someone from the course did come over and tell me that he was worried about me!
Rx
