I’ve been contemplating space in relationship to the artist. Is that what really what I’ve been doing all this time? Yes. Well. Yes. I suppose it has a something to do with not having a designated space to work for the past two years. I tend to float when this happens. This is a choice that I made. It isn’t that I feel deprived of a proper studio. ‘ve been sort of willingly and pleasantly adrift in a sea of ideas and inspiration with no particular place to manifest. I realized just recently that I had not deconstructed and vacated The Crow’s Nest as well as I could have and that I have unfinished business there. I’m not sure where to begin connecting the dots so I’ll go back to one relevant point in time, eleven years ago.

The photographs in this article are from an installation by artist Fumio Tachibana. The photographer is Yasuhide Kuge. This exhibition was the first time I had consciously experienced the artist, his inspiration, materials, work, and working space as inseparable. Tachibana is someone who has mastered the art of evocation. The re-purposing and re-imagining of “fragments” woven or arranged into a new whole is a important concept in my own work.

His subject is Clara, a fashion institute for western style dressmaking in Japan, founded and run by Motoko and Shiro Koike in 1923. They also published a fashion magazine called Yosai Shunju. The building was demolished and the magazine banned during World War 2 in 1944. I’ll take a wild guess that anything to do with western culture was not at all popular in Japan during that time. Motoko revived the institute as a classroom studio in the 1950s. When the studio was dismantled, Fumio Tachibana collected and reorganized the fragments of Motoko’s work and materials (drawings, sketches, dressmaking patterns, postwar Japanese handbills, wrapping paper, silk thread, and printing equipment) into a large scale installation of new artworks and arrangements in their own space so that the classroom itself was part of the work. There is something powerful going on here in that Motoko’s presence is strongly felt in the photographs.

Source: Communion W, 2001 Curator: Can Wong

The handwritten pages of a notebook on geography and surveying, kept by Joshua Tevis in 1804.

The entire contents of my studio and library, old book pages, works in progress, and art supplies, are still in boxes and bins waiting to be moved and reorganized. I’ll have to content myself with garden photographs, beginning with the ridiculous amount of allotment pictures from a recent trip to Boston. The light, the sky, the weather, and the scarcity of other wandering bodies made it a perfect day for taking photographs. There are a few more in my previous post and a full set on Flickr.

A collection of well tended allotments is a magical place. Although I would never again wish to live in a city, I have a fascination with small urban gardens and allotments. There is such an abundance of charm in small gardens with their clever use of structures and strategic plantings. The victory gardens on the Fenway create an oasis in the midst of crowds, cars, and chaos.

I love the rusty nails and thorny branches all over the posts and gates. I know they are there to discourage vandals and thieves but I find them so beautiful and sculptural in this context.

Mixed media art by Mother Nature in fungus on tree bark. Found in our wood pile and almost tossed into the fire.

I first ran into this weird little doll about four years ago, close to when we moved here from Boston. He lived in a glass case in one of the local antique markets. I’m not really a doll person per se. I don’t collect them and I didn’t often play with them when I was little. I was always more interested in books, then and now. I have a few of Kerry Kate‘s lovely odd hand painted dolls, who now keep company with the formerly lonely vintage Palestinian rag doll. I think I had a Blythe doll once upon a time but I wasn’t attached enough to her to swear that she existed.

For some reason I became obsessed, absolutely obsessed, with the above pictured odd little antique bisque doll from (I think) the late 1800s. He has no eyes, no hair, messed up ghoulish little teeth, and wears a threadbare roughed up outfit comprised of a jacket that is clearly too small and big pants – voluminous felted wool pants – with Dutch wooden shoes instead of feet. I would go and stare at that doll every time we went to the antique markets hunting for books and talk myself out of buying him. He was expensive for an unfinished bisque doll and I’m not a collector of things. I don’t collect objects other than books related to my work.

I think I drove C.P. McDill crazy over that doll, fussing about the doll, obsessing about the doll, informing him repeatedly that I wanted the doll. I have no idea why I wanted it and I’m sure he was completely baffled. This went on for a few years. That’s right. Years! When Erzebet came along on one of our trips to the market (when was that?) and was shown the object of my obsession, she said “Hah!” out loud “You just want that doll for the BIG pants!” I just lost it laughing and could not stop. From then on the doll was known as the BIG pants doll. Shortly after her visit, I decided I should stop obsessing and just buy the doll. So off I went to collect my doll.

Of course, he was gone.

Gone!

I searched the entire market. I grilled every dealer. No one remembered the doll or knew where it went. I thought that strange. No one noticed it except me. I was crushed and I felt completely ridiculous for feeling so crushed over a doll. This happened years ago, whenever it was that Erzebet last visited. For these past few years I have wistfully examined the glass cases every time I visit the market, hoping to see the BIG pants doll not staring at me through its naked eye sockets and baring its nasty little teeth at me. Hah! I missed that homely little incomplete face. I know it seems so weird but there was just something about it that grabbed me. Obsessions. Attachments. These happenings are such a mystery.

Then on Friday, just a few days ago, we went to the markets and I did my usual thorough plunder and pillage of every interesting affordable dusty deteriorating old book I could find. When I was at the entrance, almost done with my wheeling and dealing, about to take home my pile of crumbling papers and boards, C.P. casually walked up to me and said “Your doll is back.” I said “What?! What doll?” He said “The doll with the BIG pants, the doll you liked.” I thought “What?! The doll I liked? Liked? Are you kidding me?” The man is a master of understatement.

I had not looked in the glass cases. I ran over and looked in them all. I didn’t see the doll. I thought C.P. was messing with me but there it was on a low shelf way in the corner on a stand that said “For Display Only” Oh no! I asked if the doll had been there all along and the consensus was that it had just shown up after being on tour with the dealer who owned it. She had used it for a display and never sold it. Usually, when I fuss about whether or not to buy something, and I lose the chance, it ends up being a momentary disappointment and ultimately (as my friend Lisa pointed out when I told her this story) it is a relief. This was different. I just knew. I always had a feeling that doll would be mine and now it is. I am happy to have the doll. However, I still have no idea why I wanted it in the first place.

These book pages and covers are the latest additions to my early reader collection. The two 19th century primers were discovered on a recent treasure hunting expedition to the local antique market.

It’s all about the timing at the Antique Market in Plymouth Center. Two buildings full of dealer rooms in one of the oldest towns in the country is basically a little slice of heaven for vintage treasure hunters. Yesterday’s score was two lengths of raw silk for .50 cents each, five antique wooden frames at $5 to $10, a stack of ten pre-war early readers at $1 each and a children’s dictionary from 1849. The books were sold “as is” which is my preferred condition for old books.

I found another abecedarium in a 1872 primer, which is odd because I just made a post about abecedaria from that era and I don’t run across them all that often. C.P. found three vintage flour sacks. Forget the malls and Black Friday. This is my kind of shopping. It’s more like scavenging. I take home almost nothing that I can’t somehow turn over, either by repairing and reselling it as something useful or beautiful to someone else, or incorporating it into my work or workspace.

My favorite find is a long tray that appears to made out of wooden rulers. I have no idea what it was originally used for. It’s new purpose is to hold the paper tiles for miniature paintings. I use a wooden ruler to make them so it’s a poetic container and it fits perfectly across the back of my work table. My synchronistic mascot of the week is Burl Ives. He follows me everywhere I go, showing up as a Christmas CD in the dollar bin at the grocery store, a doodle on an old calendar page, and then as vintage LP at the Antique Market. I took the Ivesy things home too. I think my generation is programmed to have the warm fuzzies over that voice during the holiday season.

The doll with the big crazy pants was gone. I am a little sad about it and have no idea why I was so attached to this bizarre little doll with the top of his head missing. I couldn’t afford it though and as Erzebet pointed out, I probably just liked his outfit and that he looks just like the tailor character in the film “Street of Crocodiles” by Brothers Quay.

I thought this basket would be perfect for keeping the paper scraps we use for kindling. Little Nemo had other ideas. It is a good spot, right there by the fireplace.

I found this amusing graffiti in a vintage textbook from the late 1800s. I think that they reveal more creativity and humor than just drawing on a mustache and beard. I suppose that would have been redundant with the abundance of facial hair during this time period. I like the silly little hats.

This little treasure was abandoned on a dusty shelf in a thrift shop among cheap paperbacks and magazines. There was a comical sticky note on the cover which is worn and weathered red leather. The note said “belonging to an old person who liked to cook” and the price on it was 25 cents. The pages are wonderfully browned the color of coffee with cream and stuffed with old recipes in a scrapbook style, held together with a rubber band. There are mementos and clipped advertisements pressed between the pages which reveal that it was maintained sometime between the turn of the century and 1920. There is also a detached section inside made from an Excelsior exercise book dated 1901. The edges were once gilded in gold.

I wonder about the person who created it and kept it much like I keep paper journals of collage and personal notes never thinking anyone will see them. It probably never occurred to her that almost one hundred years later, someone else would find it and look at it with fascination as though a work of art.

It amazes me that a delicate personal thing like this survives for so long and finds a new audience and a purpose when many deliberate works of art from that time are long gone and forgotten. I enjoy the fanciful idea that it was a sheer act of will or a guided serendipity. It is at least a reminder that even the most ordinary and casual seeming of objects may have a path and purpose that is beyond us and surpasses our best laid plans. We do not decide what will be remembered and cherished. It’s no wonder that I find dusty old antique shops and flea markets far more interesting than museums and art galleries.