What is your inspiration?
Happy Friday!
I recently listened to this episode of Up with the Lark (if you are a creative of any sort - this podcast is an absolute must) where Host Calandra sits down with Cassandra from Atelier Ellis (I may or may not attempt to smuggle some of her delicious paints back in Canada at some point) to talk about all things inspiration and independence of thought, style and action. Aside from all of the many, many nuggets of wisdom contained therein Cassandra speaks of the inspiration she draws rom fields separate to that of interiors - from artists, thinkers, writers - they are the ones that truly inspire and inform her work. I myself think the best of spaces, the very best of design often comes in this way - when its foundation lies not in the replica of some style or image, but rather in the sensory, intellectual feast that one has sat down to. A house, then, I believe truly becomes a home, alive with thought and idea and creativity, a place fertile for all of life to take seed and bloom in boughs of frothy, imperfect, rambunctious beauty.
Olivia, one of the very first accounts I followed on Instagram, talks about “messpiration” - or the idea that a home doesn’t need to be perfectly styled, neatly laid out for it to be beautiful, that it can live and breathe in the “mess” of the everyday and in the chaos of one’s own character. Her feed is vibrant, joyful, warm and fully, completely alive. She pulls us into her universe and it doesn’t take long to feel as though you might plonk yourself down on one of her plush sofas covered in that old (probably thrifted quilt) and have with her a cup of tea with the likes of Dickens or Louisa May Alcott.
I spoke of the foundational inspiration I would take from Miró’s Le lézard aux plumes d’or a few weeks ago but of course it is not to be my only muse. Our house was built in 1950, just as the Mid Century Modern Movement was starting to pick up steam. We were right smack in the middle of a century already plagued and ripped apart by two devastating world wars, barely just over that fated day of April 29, 1945 where Berlin fell to Allied Forces and tens of SS soldiers were killed in the Dachau Massacre and the Rose ‘Peace’ was introduced to the world. European colonies were rapidly freeing themselves from the rule of the foreign monarchies that governed them and in a little more than a decade, Martin Luther King Jr. would stand before the Lincoln Memorial and ask for justice to finally be made - a dream we are still to fulfil. Women were then stepping away of the home and out, lunch pail and a fierce determination to realise the potential they had been denied in hand. Most across the western world had acquired the right to vote, we suddenly had a will of our own and were learning to inhabit that room of which Virginia Woolf had so eloquently written in 1929.
The wars had blown to pieces what we knew of ourselves, of our society and catapulted us, for better or for worst, into modernity.
The past, with all of its ornate traditions, weighed then on our shoulders as we attempted to shrug off the burden of class and tradition and oppression, as we pushed further and further into the exploration of what it meant to be human, to be alive as a self in relation with others, as an identity unbridled by convention and directed by a growing desire for justice. We turned to technology so that we could each be more, live more - lines in the home became simpler, cleaner, objects and furniture increasingly focused on sheer practicality as individualism advanced and mass production expanded. Ceilings grew lower (albeit windows larger) and as we began to find new ways of expressing our unicity, our homes (for matters of practicality) began to box us in.
That is the time my home belongs in - a time where the old was making way for the new, where prior formality was being blown up by a great big mess of simple lines and form and colour. The gardens at Sissinghurst were one such early revelation. Untidily kept, they billowed with flowers that tumbled, fumbled and rumbled into one another with little regards for the rules of the day, in one grand symphony of sensual delights. The surrealists, having distilled every little bit of the world around them into their purest form and colour, were another.
But we also no longer are in the 1950s. We have made some progress, though we still have a very long way to go and are faced with the revelations (and hence, with the revolutions) unique to this age.
I hope, therefore, for my home to be a place of meeting for we have grown estranged from one another, forgotten, in our quest for unicity and justice and meaning, perhaps a little of how to be. Who am I, when away from work, when away from social media or distanced from the crisp contours of my political views and opinions? I hope we can find more peace and quietude in the complex web of our relations.
My home shall be a place therefore where we might lay a grand feast of thoughts and ideas and art and generally beautiful things for we have forgotten, in this age of ultra-practicality, something of the joy of investing in our fellow human beings. It will be a home that respects modernity’s desire for clean and simple lines (this is not an old country estate) but that blurs the rigidity of their edges with a gaggle of colour and a froth of charming incongruity.
Consistent with the Mid-Century tradition, this space will be built on a canvas of natural material prized by the movement (wood, metal, glass) but also fabrics referencing a time much older than that, pottery, stoneware, drawings and photographs, a touch of contemporary boldness and lots and lots and lots of flowers I hope.
I am not looking for perfection. I am looking for life unbridled, music, dance and that means it may all very well change in the process.
So for now, I leave you my friends with an air of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” and a bouquet of rudbeckias in a vase made by the wonderful Djenaiba Ceramics I absolutely adore.
For next week, I wonder, would you like a little photo tour of this new home I’ve been talking about? It’s definitely not picture perfect, but you might all have some ideas for me too… ;)
xxx
Camille
