| MY LIFE AS A HOUSE |
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| The psychedelic era - Nora in the 1960s |
Maybe its because I was a celebration baby, conceived on VE Day, that Igrew up surrounded by presents. One of the first and favourite was a home made doll's house, half timbered, diamond patterns scratched into its cellulose windowpanes; clunkily built, it had annoying inch high wooden batons joining floors to walls so you couldn't put furniture against the walls. But I loved it enormously, rearranging stuff on my stomach on the floor, my head taking up a whole wall like a giant Alice down the rabbit hole. |
| I couldn't take it to boarding school of course, and after that I went to London and Art school and it moved to the back room at the farm. When I married we took it to our house in the Cotswolds, where, in time, four children played with it, and when we moved to New Zealand, out it came in the container, and into the Mount Eden villa. Then things got messier with many moves, and the splitting up of lives and furniture; eventually the doll's house came to rest up a muddy track in a Waiheke bach, that was afterwards rented furnished. The tenants had no children, so put the doll's house under the house, where the English interior ply fell apart fast. |
By the time i saw it again it was beyond repair, but of course I hauled it out remorsefully and stored it under the next house, belatedly wrapped in plastic, and got on with other things. For my sixtieth birthday i got a present I had not been expecting. I was summoned for morning tea at my eldest daughter's house round the corner; and walked in to find a room full of friends and family, waiting to see my face change. Indeed it did; for over in the corner, under a cloth, was a most familiar shape; and as the cloth came off i saw, as in a dream, my dolls house completely transformed, as i had always wanted it, with lights and wallpaper, floorboards and tiles, and all the furniture of the times I had lived through in my own life. |
| For six months, my fine family had written to old friends and neighbours, soliciting memories of my childhood, art school days, country life in the Cotswolds. They had organised its shipping back to my son's place, and worked on it in secret in every spare moment, recording the process in an album alongside. |
| My house is now furnished biographically. The top left bedroom is my childhood room, all chintz and pony photos, while the right hand one sports the op art wallpaper, posters, records and general chaos of my London art school years. |
| Downstairs in the 70's kitchen, quarry tiled and Habitat curtained, is my old Aga, with drying rack full of nappies, big table covered in plates and wine bottles, and a high chair with a Humpty Dumpty (remember them?) made by a friend who made the one for my son. There is a framed print of the local Cotswolds church, green gumboots, and a miniature of an applique picture i once made for another friend. On the right hand side is the Ponsonby living room I now inhabit, with curtains by Footeprints, Pacific mat by Angela Fraser, tapa wallpaper(I don't really have that) and a collection of more contemporary New Zealand painting than I will ever own, downloaded from the Auckland Art Gallery website by my youngest daughter Holly, who worked there. |
The three attic rooms were left bare, ready for my next projects. Over the last year, many other details have been added; over the next decades i Know many more will arrive. The most wonderful thing about this gift is how it has connected my life up; all those ricochet moves now have for me some sense of an orderly progression. While the rooms are wildly various, they are all in the same house. My heartfelt thanks for that. |
| Nora West, January, 2007 |
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