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Learn A Lesson In Artistic Housekeeping At Christchurch Mansion
By 24 Hour Museum Staff
25/11/2005
Image: Shows a photo of a padded ironing board seemingly pushing through an ajar wooden door.
Comfort ironing board in vintage cotton by Sandra Flower.
As any Ikea-induced traffic jam will testify, we’re pretty obsessed with our domestic interiors. We seem to take great pride in the form, style and substance of everything from ovens to oven gloves.
Sandra Flower, whose work is on show in the Room Upstairs at Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich until January 8 2006, plays with the notion of a well-ordered domestic scene and amusingly subverts it.
The Art of Good Housekeeping presents an array of commonplace tools that would be found in any home. Yet, while being reassuringly recognisable, they’re also strangely unexpected.
Infinity oven glove in sky blue gingham by Sandra Flower.
They’re out-sized, made from unusual materials or even ‘useless’; a sieve made of multi-coloured yarn is an attractive object to look at but has been stripped of its original purpose.
It seems the artist’s aim is to disrupt the routine that tends to settle upon domestic life and housekeeping in particular.
Rambling-sieve in natural dyed yarn by Sandra Flower.
More to the point she creates a little chaos in what is otherwise, and seems intended, to be a well-ordered example of the English obsession with having an immaculate home.
According to the exhibition organisers, the work is all the more powerful for its setting in the historic Christchurch Mansion.
A 16th century manor house set in a 100-acre park close to the centre of Ipswich, Christchurch was once the kind of ordered and comfortable home that Flower appears to like undermining.
Christchurch Mansion
Christchurch Mansion, Soane Street, Ipswich, IP4 2BE, Suffolk, England
Open: 2007:
From Sunday 8th April Christchurch Mansion will open
Monday through till Sunday 10.00am till 5.00pm
Closed: 2007:
Closed Good Friday, 24th to 26th, 31st December and 1st January.
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