If human could only ask God for one power, it might be the ability to resurrect. To revive, restore, revitalise, recreate…any means to bring a person, an object, a scene, a place, an experience back to memories’ forefront. These sometimes takes the form of art, or styles, or skills, or technologies or wealth; but as I come back to visit the Strawberry Hill House for a second time, I wonder if the place have simply always been filled with a desire for an inexistent time.
Arches, ribbed vaults painted in gold, floral ornaments, chimney pieces adapting medieval tombs, carvings of antelopes. Enchanted as always, the crafts covers every corner like a spell unfolding further on every second. Today is more special. It is the thirty-first day of December, so the Christmas charm is still around.
Christmas trees merrily stand on various landings, very lushly adorned and give out an unearthly soft glow. One even has knittings of bees and caterpillars and moths all over it. In the most featured rooms, dried flowers and fruits, pine cones, twigs of different scales are accompanied by delicate accessories and tableware. The exhibition calls these “tablescapes”, but I’d more prefer to call them “forms”. Doesn’t “tablescape”, like “landscape”, sound too static and enduring? To me it is nearly animating to look at them: the way the ribbon hangs on a branch leaning to one side, the orange pieces slightly curved from drying, round fruits balanced on the table cloth at a fragile equilibrium. I recall my years doing Chinese paintings, when I had to pay attentions to details like the shape petals fold, the tension and strength in an arching branch. If I try to trace it back, perhaps that was the most vigorous formation of my senses.
Coming back to these carefully designed floral display, I am reading them as “theatre” and “still-life”. Natura morta. Dead nature. It is a celebration of the living, the beauty of heaven’s design, at the same time reminding life’s fragility and brevity. Here the plants and fruits are no longer living, but also here its aura redesigned and revived; just as we continue to move on with all facets of life, contemplating and enduring.
31.12.24
