Artists’ Housing (2004)
In 2004 I made a series of boxes as housing for some of my beloved artists. The covering materials and the contents of these boxes reflect the spirit and work of my chosen artists.
Private Collection
Jane Austen
Jane Austen’s house is wrapped in an early 19th Century legal document on parchment, and is filled with letters handwritten to her protagonists. The letter paper is also from the 19th Century.
Calligraphy: Anna Pinto
Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë
Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, who shared a home in real life, also share a home — a vicarage — in my series. The marbled lining papers are patterns they might have chosen for their own published books.
Julia Margaret Cameron
A camera is a perfect little black house for Julia Margaret Cameron. When you peer through the viewfinder, you will see a photo of her favorite model, her niece Julia Jackson. Julia Jackson is Virginia Woolf’s mother.
Emily Dickinson
The pencil was Emily Dickinson’s writing tool. If you unroll the scrolls filling her house, you can read her poems, written in pencil. Dickinson bound small groupings of her poems into booklets or “fascicles.” She sewed all forty of her fascicles with red string.
Liubov Popova
Liubov Popova’s house is guarded, inside and out, by Russian Constructivist paper dolls. The dolls are anchored to the box with Velcro, which means they can be removed and played with!
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf’s French doors open onto her library. The decorative papers covering her library walls are reproduction book papers from the 1930’s.
Sonia Delaunay
Sonia Delaunay’s house is, like the artist, all about color. Her lack of training in bookbinding did not stop her from binding some spectacularly beautiful, technically crude, books. And then there is her masterpiece: “La Prose du Transsibérien et de La Petite Jehanne de France.”
Harper Lee
Harper Lee’s cigar box house is a replication of Jem’s cigar box, filled with the small treasures hidden in a tree, gifts from the mysterious Boo Radley.
