I’m drawn to ceramics that have a sense of humour, and Kelly Jessiman’s classic Hellenic shapes are brimming with it. It’s her handles –– wonky, lopsided, elongated –– that bring the whimsy. Her surface decoration has a painterly quality, as though each vessel is a canvas. It was a dear artist friend that first introduced me to Jessiman’s work. A friend who brings great humour to her own work. All the eccentricity, colour and contradiction that make a vessel (person) interesting are present in these vases. Jessiman fires her work in a shed in her garden, which is the dream.
Every time my Mum visits from England she leaves something behind. Sometimes it’s her scent, woven in to a cushion or a tea towel. Other times it’s a drain snake for the build-up of hair in our bathroom sinks. This time, she left us a 1000-piece puzzle strewn loosely all over the kitchen table. It’s a vibrant collage of Mediterranean windows, several of which she assembled while we put the world to rights over tea and toast. One anxious morning last week, I found real calm and focus in the tiny terracotta pots that lined the sills of one of the many windows. My son organizes the pieces while he eats his cereal in the morning and my youngest daughter treats the puzzle like a late night meditation. Every day, one of us sits down to add something. I just love that she’s still here, scattered all over our kitchen table, yellow bunting, green shutters, geraniums in every shade of pink.
It wasn’t until a few years ago when a neighbour’s daughter watched me bring a giant conifer into the living room that it dawned on me what a strange tradition it is. “There’s a tree next to your couch,” said the little girl. Her family is Jewish and this was her first time decorating a Christmas tree. In recent years, I’ve suggested alternatives to my family –– amaryllis in clay pots, a plug-in olive tree, or how about some twinkly branches? –– all met with varying levels of conniption. The year I doused a three-foot Balsam Fir in lights will forever be the year Mama Stole Christmas. I get it. Had my Mum proposed juniper berry branches in slender glass vases as an alternative to the plump, jolly green confection I was used to, I would have probably lobbed a mince pie at the wall. Christmas overwhelms me. It overwhelms most of us. The lights, the music, the excess. The cloudburst of needles. The heightened expectations. It is a lot. Bringing a ten-foot tree into a skinny Victorian and stationing it next to your couch for a month, is a lot. But we do it because we know that our children love the tradition. And because we loved it when we were young. And because, despite the bickering and breaking of baubles and untangling of wires and NEEDLES EVERYWHERE –– not to mention the sheer bizarreness of it all –– a tree covered in lights and sparkle really is a sight to behold.
