Armchair with Ears
An armchair* arrives in London in the 1960s. Gustavian, an immigrant from my Swedish grandmother’s Stockholm flat to my parents’ west London home. It settles besides the worn burgundy leather Chesterfield. To complement or compete with, I was never sure. Like the people around it, the chair is also a migrant, carrying stories, absorbing voices and listening. Between these two pieces of furniture, elegant and decorative on the one side, dark and traditional on the other, my childhood quietly unfolds.
Blue enters early.Often I sit listening to my parents’ friends speaking in different languages, laughing, smoking, drinking coffee from blue and white Spode cups. Later when I buy my own china, though it is bolder and more abstract, I unconsciously choose the same colours of our Swedish and Maltese summers.
Installation at Espacio Gallery, London
2026
Armchair with Ears
The chair accompanies our family through many moves, different homes - from South London to Gloucestershire and Wales -and eventually back to London. Later, as we go off on our travels - the boys to university and me to work abroad- the furniture goes into storage. When finally the chair is released, it asks to be reborn.
In Madrid I discover how to make paper from cotton and lokta, and with cyanotype the plants of a summer imprint their shapes into the deepest blues of childhood.
So, the chair has travelled, acquired new layers, been stripped back and remade, yet its essence remains. Transposed onto velvet, the armchair that I sat on as a very young girl when my feet could not touch the ground, returns not simply as furniture but as a witness, still listening to the stories that unfold around it.
*Louis XVI Bergère a Oreilles - armchair with ears.
Handmade paper made at Arratos Studio, Madrid
Upholstery by Third Person Upholstery @thirdpersonupholstery
Blue Velvet cyanotype fabric printed by Hatley Print @hatleyprint
Blue Constellations.
Round Cushion. Velvet
Paper Vessel I
Hand made paper from cotton and linen.
Ginkgo I.
Digital Print.