Nannie's House


I believe it was Carl Jung who asked 'What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits'.

Yesterday as part of my post grad course at Artpocket studios, I took part in a 'World in a Box' workshop with Eve Pandolfini (@eve.pandolfini on Instagram), and I discovered that Jung was absolutely right. 

As a kid I was always turning boxes into little houses or miniature worlds; a street of Oxo box shops, a small Victorian theatre, a matchbox home for a conker, a snow scene in a cereal box, a garden in a dish ... the list was endless. I had the occupants of my dolls house sub-let an upstairs bedroom to a pair of Austrian dolls in traditional dress, furnished it in cardboard and made their Austrian doll babies their own teeny dolls house. Worlds within worlds. Happiness was scissors, sellotape and a set of felt tips.

But when you are a grown up, you forget to be playful. 

Yesterday's workshop was a dance back through time to that total absorption of childhood's carefree creativity. What I made was, of necessity, not finely finished, but that wasn't the point. It was a box in which I relived the happy 1970s world of Lilac Cottage: my grandmother's house, in which I spent a lot of my early childhood. The sumptuous sanctuary of the enormous feather bed I slept in, her 1920s copies of Chatterbox with the fascinating single-colour illustrations, the arrival of strong tea (in a rattling cup and saucer) which heralded the legendary butter-soaked Fat Toast made by my grandfather. 

I may well allow the urge to make another World in a Box overwhelm me. Bliss. 


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World in a Box (model): cardboard, felt pens

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