Secret Knowledge: The Private Life of a Dolls' House

I watched this documentary last week as a part of my research for the John Lewis competition. It's presented by Lauren Child, the author and illustrator of Charlie and Lola.

Child's work, with it's use of collage and playful attitude to scale, clearly has its roots in her love for miniatures. She says in the documentary that Charlie & Lola almost exist in a Scandinavian doll house, where the rooms are tall and warm and patterned, with low handing lights and orange colours.

Her work is very charming, I remember reading Clarice Bean books when I was a child and loving the illustrations.

It's interesting that she now designs fabrics for Liberty - it's almost as though her work has come full circle back to the dolls house.

I love her collaboration with Polly Borland, the photographer, on The Princess and the Pea. The mixture of her illustrations and the dolls house techniques, mostly made by Child herself, is very cute! As she notes in the documentary, dolls houses have an air of nostalgia for a time that didn't really exist - a Victorian or Georgian era minus the slums and rickets. (Although I'm sure somebody has made that.)

Another interesting thing from the documentary, is that 'baby houses' were often used as teaching tools for young girls. By playing with the miniature house they could learn about housekeeping, cleaning, decor. Despite being a product of an oppressive era for women this is oddly empowering, girls teaching other girls about one of the few areas of their lives they had real control: the home.

My initial idea was greatly inspired by the dolls house. I get a lot of what Lauren Child says about feelings of warmth and nostalgia and cuteness evoked by the dolls house, they are ideas I want to get across in my concept for John Lewis. I think it's important the idea still feels modern however.

Dog bench!

This doggo has appeared throughout my development for BOBA DOG, and even though she didn't appear in my final paintings her spirit was immortalised in my single favourite thing I have ever made:

DOG BENCH!

I was inspired by Misaki Kawai who makes wonderful furniture for her exhibitions. I needed something to display my ceramics, something that wouldn't detract from the pieces but also added to the exhibition.

Whilst I'm not awful at D.I.Y type jobs, I am a bit of a haemophiliac and because of that I'm super cautious about blades, screws, drilling, nails - all the sharp bits from furniture making. So I enlisted my Dad to do the potentially dangerous things. First off I designed the piece and made a mock up from paper. You can see in the image on the right how we used this to cut out some thick MDF. It was originally a very simple three piece design that would have slotted together and been pretty portable. It got a bit complicated when we could not locate our router! Hand-sawing a slot was not an option so we had to find a way of screwing it together. 

We added a support beam under the centre panel and spent a long time putting the dog in weird positions. (Above: downward facing dog.) It was stressful and complicated but we did it!

Painting took the longest out of all the steps. I sanded, primed, sanded, undercoat, sanded, gloss coat, drying, gloss coat, drying, and finally added the details. 

The dog ended up looking really great in the space, I was really glad!

BOBA DOG!

Last Thursday was the opening of my exhibition in Milk Tea & Pearl, BOXPARK Shoreditch! The show is a selection of personal work based around the idea of being a 'mutt'. It was really nice to take a break from brief orientated work and do something very personal. 

I got the exhibition after I saw an advert on MTP's instagram, I sent them my portfolio and links to my social media. They offered me the space free of charge! Nung, the owner, is really keen for the cafes to have space for work - he knows how hard it is in London to promote yourself. 

Setting Up!

In the end I had a lot of monoprints and paintings to choose from, but I was only really satisfied with a few of them. I think by being selective I've forced myself to choose the strongest images. I did a panicked run to Paperchase on Wednesday morning, praying they'd have nice frames - they did! I considered painting them, but the neutral colour was really appealing and gave a nice uniformity to the pieces. 

I also decided to put everything on one side of the space, it's really quite a small area so I didn't want to cause disruption to the cafe. The idea is that people can look at them as they queue, it gets quite busy during lunchtime, lots of office workers running in for a pick-me-up. 

I was really happy with how the ceramics looked, they can be difficult to display just because of awkward sizes and angles. Having them low down on the bench really helped with displaying the plates. I also put my business cards here and my badges! (Inside the PUPMART bag!)

Private View

The private view was so much fun! I expected 20 people to turn up, but my final count made 55! It was a nice steady stream of visitors. I rather stupidly said we'd stay open until 11pm, just because I was pulling times out of my arse and BOXPARK closes at that time. There were still quite a few people around when I left, 9.30pm, but they were clearly there for the clubbing - I was shattered, my friends and family were giong, it was time for me to go too!

I think in the future it's best that private view times are a little narrower (5.30 - 11.00??? Why did I think I would be able to do that?) - 7.30pm - 11.00pm would have been more realistic.

To the right is a picture of the massive bag of FREE popcorn we were given! I never confirmed beer with the manager so in the end there was no free booze, but loads of free tea so nobody was too miffed about that! I gave out badges as well, a few people took photos of their ~merch~ and posted them Instagram.

These are some screenshots of my instagram profile, I'm very picky about how things look and try and upload in threes to keep a nice consistent feel. Then there are pictures I'm tagged in! The top three are all from the private view ~ Some people tag in comments instead of the photo, there's an example of a girl who picked up a badge! It's really great to see this online response, I didn't get to talk to everybody on the night - although I felt like I never stopped talking!  I spent the day after sending out thank yous to people and replying to comments. I can see why famous people hire assistants to do this, it's weirdly draining.

That's everything for now! I will make some smaller posts about how I made the dog bench and the ~marketing~ of the event.