Gracia and I feature on Inside Out in relation to Playing Field.
Meet some of the artists featured in Playing Field, Craft Cubed’s childhood-inspired exhibition
Were you creative when you were a kid?
Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison: We both were — like many, like all — creative as kids. We drew constantly, making up fantastical worlds populated entirely by mice (me) or of some weird invention, building or place (Louise). Louise tells me she would build enormous villages from Lego, with her brother Gordon, that covered the entire floor. I, when not drawing, spent time sewing costumes for toys and making creatures from felt and wool.
When you were given this theme of ‘childhood and playtime’ for the exhibition, did you draw on your own past or did you look on the childhood of kids you currently know as inspiration?
We drew largely upon our own, before sprinkling the dish — the various collage pieces — with red herrings, added to taste. There are elements drawn directly from both actual childhood days and elements selected for similarity in feel.
There is a tiny white rabbit seated at a table surrounded by three foxes eager to know him better (in our print Tiny as a soul, there comes the rabbit), and there is a girl riding an ostrich through Venice (in our print Moving forward in the way of all things). These are all the kinds of scenarios one dreams up as a child. These are all the kind of scenarios one, equally, dreams up today.
There are French-speaking animals throughout, characters from the Ballet Russes, and in one work, There are cities one will not see again, new cities that resemble both Cairo and Brittany are entwined together. In our new artists’ book, Sleeping during the day, there are hares and rabbits and seahorses escaping as — in the distance — a volcano erupts, and Neptune enters the room by way of a passageway concealed as a fireplace. There are collaged elements from books we read as children and characters from an Aesop fable as illustrated by Arthur Rackham. There is Tom Thumb in there, too. It is fun to dream up these scenarios, to make anything possible, to move our characters about on a giant paper stage.
What’s one thing about childhood that you’re not nostalgic about at all?
Looking back, it all reads well — though I do not miss dragging my guitar along the ground as I walked to school, consequently wearing a large hole in its base. Nor do I miss playing team sports. Louise does not miss being encouraged to eat certain foods at teatime — brussel sprouts and spinach being the main offenders. Nor does she miss having to keep a tidy room.
GH
(Thank you, Gracia, for answering these questions about our work. You are marvellously handy.)
