Posts from March 2023

sea shells

March 27, 2023

For several years my family has travelled to a small island on the Gulf Coast side of Florida for beach walks and grouper sandwiches. The sand there feels like pastry flour and is laced with a million shells from cockles and lightening whelks to rough scallops and calico clams. If you’re really lucky, you may even find a sand dollar or a dried-up starfish. Shelling takes time and patience. My largest shells are from Irene’s house. All the best shells wash up on her little beach. Irene and my Mum have been fiends since childhood and no visit to Anna Maria is complete without a drive over the bridge to her weathered clapboard on Longboat Key. Most of the shells have some imperfection –– a small crack, a chip or some discolouration –– but they’re still so beautiful. This time, I found two large Southern Quahogs, chalky white with rough lines on the outside, and a fighting conch (the ones with the jagged spires at the top). I also brought home a bag of broken seashells; teeny, tiny fragments that I’ll piece together to make something whole. Eventually, I hope to take shells collected over many years and mount them on some lovely fabric, but in the meantime, they live in pockets and drawers and inside my shoes.

luck of the Irish

March 18, 2023

My grandmother was a Bostonian of Irish descent, a heritage somewhat washed out by all the Greeks in the house. I remember her making beer battered shrimp a few times, (that must have originated in somebody’s Nan’s kitchen?) but other than that, my very Greek Papou did all the cooking. I’m not sure I even knew my Yiayia wasn’t Greek until my teens, which given her terrible Greek accent and strawberry blonde hair shows how very up my own arse I was. She had freckles on every part of her body and wore yellow visors bedazzled with jewel encrusted frogs. She was a very young grandmother, seventeen-years younger than my grandfather, and after he died she only lived three short, sharp years without him. I came to visit her the Spring before she died at the apartment they had shared in North Palm Beach and within minutes of arrival we were at the local karaoke (a cafeteria in a nearby plaza) with my grandmother on stage (a chair) singing Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Please Release Me,” followed by Irish super ballad, “Danny Boy.” She was wearing a cream cotton pant suit that night. Or maybe it was spearmint satin. My memory is froggy. She died a year later and “Danny Boy” played at her wake. And six-months after that, I sat on her memorial bench in Central Park and listened to the same Irish ballad singing at The Boathouse nearby.

shoe in

March 15, 2023

The first pair of designer shoes I ever bought were cream with red piping and a kitten heel so small that they were almost flats. I think I was just as excited about the felt shoe bag as I was the shoes. Marc Jacobs. I wore them everywhere, and with everything. Skinny jeans, check. Tea dresses, check. To the cinema, out to dinner, in the grass. I have no idea where they are now. Did I give them away? Throw them away? Are they in my mother-in-law’s North York basement with all the other sartorial relics? What I loved most about the shoe is that it exposed the perfect amount of toe cleavage, not too much, not too little, and that the leather softened with every party and every mad dash for the 22 bus. The 22 bus that took me straight home. These pink leather beauties (with a point like my MJ’s ) are from the 1800s. Fashion is cyclical. So is life.

memory lane

March 14, 2023

As luck would have it, I found myself in the east end this morning walking past the vegetable sellers and coffee shops of Gerrard. There was a time when I spent a lot of time east of the Don River scouring antique shops for old lamps and fabric trims and scoffing down pancakes at some diner or another. Our home was filled with things snapped up on lazy Sundays in Leslieville. A Finn Juhl chair (or so we were told) upholstered in tangerine microsuede. A wooden bowl shaped like a pineapple. Mid-century salt and pepper shakers. One of my first jobs out of journalism college was at a design magazine with a tiny office in a building on River Street. My first byline there was an article on a beautiful Siamak Hariri project with a white spiral staircase not so dissimilar to the one in our home. The best ideas need time to percolate. To travel through. These days, I’m rarely in the east end. I rarely leave the Annex, to be honest. My world is small and intense. And when I do step out, like I did today, I discover a world of nostalgia and possibility.

maquette

March 7, 2023

Sometimes, maquettes can be more beautiful than the object they were made for. There’s something about the diminutive version that’s so appealing. I love to look at Henry Moore’s plaster maquettes at the AGO. Positioned in a glass case just outside a vast room of his reclining figures, his maquettes offer a glimpse into the sculptor’s process. We can picture his fingers moving across the plaster, the entire figure resting in his hands. Moore aimed for monumentality in his work and his small maquettes are infused with as much of it as his larger works. For the last few weeks, I’ve been making paper maquettes of things I am either working on, or would like to work on in clay. Paper is cheap, and making a paper vase takes ten minutes versus the hours and hours that I pour into a clay one, and so I come to each one with a levity and irreverence that’s refreshing. I like them a lot, and while they lack the permanence of clay, they are feeding something in me that I hope will live on.

my loo

March 6, 2023

Long time readers know about my penchant for fancy powder rooms so it’ll come as no surprise that when we finally renovated our home it was the loo that got the most attention. “Must we have a toilet,” I half joked to the contractor. Even the chicest potties are an eyesore. And don’t get me started on the flush plates. Designers go to great lengths to disguise the toilet. Nicky Haslam has a bespoke commode in the guest loo of his London flat and Maria Speake’s of Retrouvius uses elaborate wallpapers to distract us from from the toilet bowl. We opted for one of those floating designs, and in a moment of madness I considered a black model –– so 80’s –– so that it would blend into the midnight blue walls. I came to my senses, and in the end, I barely notice the loo anymore. That is, unless I’m scouring it. But if I ever design another one, I’m splashing out on a Delfts blue Victorian loo with a mahogany seat. Because, why not?

essentialism

March 4, 2023

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak,” Hans Hofmann.

nostalgia

March 1, 2023

Every now and then, there’s a scent or a sound or a taste that whisks up back to another time. It’s jarring that something so specific, like Imperial Leather soap or burnt marshmallows can have that much power over our emotional state. Photographs, too, have the power to transport us to another state and time. Why do we choose to frame certain pictures? Why do we choose that precise moment as the screensaver on our phone? Because it captures a state of being, a moment in time that we hope to access just by virtue of seeing it. Earlier in the week, my dear friend and fellow potter, Michelle Organ sent me a photo of me working in the communal studio she once owned in downtown Toronto. I was all at once catapulted back to that time. The shirt I was wearing, the plate I was painting, the feelings inside. It was all so visceral. I actually cried. Was it nostalgia? Was it a yearning for a creative community that I am currently without? Was it the fact that my hair was long enough to wear in a top knot? We don’t know at the time that these ordinary moments will one day resonate in the way that they do. And that, in part, is what makes them so extraordinary.

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