For thirty years Marly’s grandad was a cobbler in the small village of Ayios Tychonas on the southern coast of Cyprus. As a child Marly had proudly worn sandles that he’d made for her to Sunday service. After his death she returned to the village with her husband, her grandparents’ land and out houses were being cleared before being sold, the site was to house a new larger church. Whilst clearing out one of the buildings Marly found and rescued an old sack filled with her grandfather’s shoe lasts.
06 Mar 2011
Jane made this poster with her seven year old daughter to advertise the local school’s second hand uniform sale. Jane was the seamstress, making the dress out of paper and her daughter was the typographer.
27 Feb 2011
Michael bought this at Brick Lane in east London roughly twenty years ago. He thought it was beautiful but didn’t know what it was. A quick search revealed it to be a tool for preparing fishing bait. Bread is compressed by turning the butterfly screw, this delays it’s disintegration in the water. The press was manufactured in the mid to late 50s by Lesney, they also made die cast toy cars. Michael accumulates all sorts of odd objects, as a designer he uses them as a kind of research into the nature of things; ‘I think there’s a powerful right-ness to things like these. Like most tools, they’re things that just kind of evolved, most likely via the knowledge of a production engineer, rather than a designer and this gives them their right-ness. They have a subtly engineered elegance and beauty that comes from processing material in a sensitive and efficient fashion.’
20 Feb 2011
Aged twelve Hilary travelled with her family from her native Australia to Seville. Her father took her to a small family run shop where he’d always bought his gloves. He treated her to a red goatskin pair lined with rabbit fur. They were too beautiful to wear so she’d occasionally pull them out to look at but return them safely to the drawer where they lived. Five years later her dad died, the gloves became even more precious. At aged twenty two Hilary moved to England, she took the gloves with her and, prompted by the cold, began to wear them. She loved them even more as they softened with the patina of use. Travelling to Eastern Europe to visit her boyfriend she realised that she was missing one. After contacting the airport’s lost property she resigned herself to it’s loss. The single glove now serves no practical purpose but is an especially poignant talisman to her dad.
13 Feb 2011
When Jayne and Nick moved into their new flat in 2008 they had to replace some of the old floorboards, pulling them up they found that uneven areas had been packed out with newspapers. The papers revealed the year that the work had been done, Coronation year, 1952. Smiling back at them from a hole in the floor was a young Queen Elizabeth II in perfectly preserved colour. Before replacing the boards they inserted a newspaper from the day they’d moved in.
06 Feb 2011
Charlie bought this needlepoint in a stoop sale in Brooklyn. It was just a few dollars and his friend insisted that he buy it because it was a perfect likeness. It now sits all over the internet as his online ‘Charlie icon’, mates still ask what software he used to create it.
30 Jan 2011
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