Thursday Salute to Originals: Recollections of Child’s Play
Think back to your memories of building a childhood fort. This recollection is probably infused with connotations of warmth, coziness, tightly enclosed space, and found objects. While many artists express their work in clustered objects, this set designer and self-taught artist harkens back to the era of her childhood fort-building days as inspiration.
Taking domestic objects such as gauzy fabric, chairs, or top hats, Nicola Yeoman transports us into eerie scenes. There is something breathtaking about her meticulously arranged objects coming together with hazy lighting, purposeful composition, and an evocative context – a romantic organization, if you will. The works possess an air of domesticity, but also strangeness, offering much to ponder.
There are millions of words that could be written about the interpretation of these pieces and we would love to hear yours. For now, we’ll stick to the nuts and bolts by discussing the design tools used in Yeoman’s work. Most of the arrangements use suspension as the structure, with the strong exception of the cracked floorboards which seemed to have lost their battle with gravity.
The use of domestic objects places a level of familiarity and home, though the settings are often quite the opposite – abandoned warehouses, quiet forests, and empty rooms. This contrast of material connotations sets off a whole other dialogue.
This Thursday, we salute those creators who go beyond formal training and simply stick to the basics – such as modernizing the archetypal children’s couch-cushion-and-blanket fortress.
Image sources: Joshua Twentythree via Flickr Creative Commons, Feel Desain