{i've fallen head over heels}

Renée Perle by Jacques Henri Lartigue.

{lovely}

{backgrounds}

Here's a little bit about my background, and where my love for beautiful homes and making things stems from. My great great grandparents were painters, and they didn't contain their work to the canvas. It flowed out of the frame and all over their home, creating a bright and stimulating place to raise a family of lovers, friends and children. I think their work - which was in the homes of my mother, grandmother and great-grandmothers - filtered into my creative subconcious from an early age, and only much later did I begin to see the parallels. They even created theatre costumes! Their home, Charleston Farmhouse, is now open to the public and is well worth a visit or three.

These photographs were taken by Alan MacSweeney and they are my favorite taken of the house so far

{her melodious lay}

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

Act IV, scene VII of Hamlet.

After coming across this post by Abundance, I decided to search through my files for images inspired by Ophelia's watery end. There is something about her absolute vulnerability; her peace, her tragedy, and the stagnant delicacy of her stillness. Her body floats in the deep black of some bottomless body of water, slowly sinking back into a fathomless mystery. For me, these photos are beautiful, poetic, and ultimately terrible.

{reasonable request}

This year for my birthday, i'm not asking for much. In fact i'm asking for nothing at all, save this one, tiny, thing. A lilac pony please.

*happy b day*

Portrait by Alen MacWeeney

I've just gotten home from seeing my dear grannie Henrietta, who's birthday it is today! I dropped by unannounced with flowers, and found her in checkey pyjamas having coffee in her lovely pale pink mews house. Isn't she beautiful? Happy birthday! x x x

*greys & brights*

I present to you the wonderful interiors photography by David Cleveland! I love the grey walls, bright cushions and wellies, and essentially these lovely domestic still lives. Yum! What more can I say?

Love Love Love.

{blood wedding}

Taken from a Life Magazine from the 50s.

I have been designing for Blood Wedding as part of my costume design degree, and I thought I would share some of the images from my moodboards. It's been an intense process! Written in the early 1930s by Federico Garcia Lorca, Blood Wedding is saturated with symbology and themes that are still very relevant today. It is all the more poignant as this very month the Spanish authorities have allowed the mass grave that supposedly holds Lorca's body to be exhumed. Lorca was tragically murdered just before the Spanish Civil War picked up momentum, thought by many to have been targeted for being a radical and outspoken left wing writer who was very popular in the Spanish arts scene of the twenties and thirties. He is also well known as Salvador Dali's lover and a fim was recently made titled Little Ashes about Dali and his love affairs. All in all, it has been fascinating! Hope you enjoy the images below...

The Bride afloat in the current of her passions... and can be found here.

I love the pleating and the make up in this shot. Really inspiring... and can be found here.

So beautiful, and so haunting. More can be found here, which I found via here.

When I can remember how to track this down I will post it again! Isn't it wonderful?

A mold spore under a microscope - surprisingly beautiful, but then, decay is at the heart of the cycle of life so how could it not be? More can be found here.

A wonderful home photo of a 1930s bride...

I have a feeling that I found this still life either on Florizel or Ullabenulla, but unfortunately I gathered it for my image files a long, long time ago! It's one that has inspired me time and time again, so thank you whomever posted it!

Brave woman.

More underwater angels from here.

Bottelicious {Two}

A charming gift {above} proffered by the lovely Florizelle at Le Divan Fumoir Bohemien. Aren't the multitudes of blue simply delicious? They remind me a lot of my great grandmother's glass collections which she grouped mostly by colour {below}. The photo above is "...a picture of Elephant House, Edward Gorey's house, by  Kevin Mac Dermott." From what I read, Edward Gorey lived an isolated life in his house which he very rarely revealed to others. In a new book of photographs, Mac Dermott, a close confidante of Gorey's, opens the doors to the inner life of Gorey and his fascinating collections. I really must track down this book... thank you Florizelle!

 

Elephant House.

A close up of one part of the installation which I blogged last March in "{Twisted} Stories".

Do take a look at some of Gorey's illustrations, they really are magical...

Thanks for reading x

hitler's bathtub

I stumbled across a series of documentaries the other night which blew me away. I watched one after the other and stayed up way too late, but it was absolutely worth the sleep deprivation. The first documentary was on Lee Miller, so that is where I shall begin also...

After her death, her son discovered over 40,000 of her negatives in the attic after Miller had placed them there along with the acknowledgement that they existed. He was to find that she had been a great beauty and model for Vogue in the 30s and that she had embraced the Surrealist movement in Paris before becoming the only woman photographer of the second world war. Her photo journalism for Vogue captured the horrors of Dachau, the blitz of London and even getting caught up in the crossfire in Brittany. The photo below is from the years she spent with her Egyptian husband in North Africa when she began to experiment with her camera before the war. The photo above was taken in Hitler's bathtub, days after he committed suicide and was the culmination of her work. 

Of course I knew of Lee Miller's work, but I'd never followed her story. The two are inseparable.

If anyone is interested, you can still catch the Annie Leibovitz segment on BBC4's website iPlayer. Don't miss it!

just a few of my favorite things*

A mini photo essay of things that have leapt off the page at me today - kitchens, miss golightly and the delightful photographer ngoc minh ngo. I've gone interiors mad lately, partly because i'm free of all big attention grabbing commitments right now, and it is only then that one can justify pondering paint charts and curtain poles. Well. Ish. A little more light hearted frippery for the soul...

we are stardust*

Lately, I've had a bit of an interest in all things Physics. Well, sort of. If I had a list titled "Top Dumbstruck Learning Moments at School", i'd say a fair few of them occurred in my Physics class. Now I liked chemistry - that was my class' first introduction to science. I remember a series of bangs and varying degrees of blindness, before our teacher got back on his feet and handed out several mis-matched pairs of goggles and enormous white coats that swamped our eleven year old frames. Biology was quite fun - remember the onion skin test? Oh yes, we liked our microscopes. But though Physics was rather uncool, i'll never forget the day our dear teacher told us the universe was growing. That if it was growing, it surely followed that it had a boundary, an edge of sorts. That not only was it round, but that we should sit and try to imagine what the edge could possibly look like, and what was on the other side. To be honest, all I saw was whiteness - maybe a side effect from earlier experiments that day? Now that, my friends, beats even the largest of chunks of combusting magnesium. That mind-boggling speech was swiftly followed by Joni Mitchell sweetly singing out "we are stardust, billion year old carbon, we are golden!" That was our teacher's favorite song of course.

So here's to that teacher who made all that science stuff so terribly brain-engaging. He was also very good at easter-egg hunts - scientifically based ones of course... It was also he that paid for my and a friend's tickets to go and see Dr. James Lovelock's speak at the local hall, which was the first i'd really heard of the dying surface of our planet Earth. I went and bought Lovelock's first book the other day, along with Hawking's "A Briefer History of Time". All of those tantalizing questions posed to us in that class are addressed in these here fine books, let alone that whole light year thing (did you know that light particles can travel 186,000 miles in one second? One second? That just blows the whole light year concept right out of my spatial comfort zone, yet how bloody exciting!)

Anyhow, I have yet to finish it and besides, i'm quite sure Hawking is rather better than me in explaining these sort of explosive existential tit bits. So i'll leave you with some images of our universe that quite literally blow my tiny human thoughts into a million particles of possibilities. What does your edge look like?

Photos courtesy of Jason Ware.