Such stairs!

Missed seeing this

600 metres of picture framing, used to decorate a marble staircase at the V&A during London Design Week this year. Framing was supplied by John Jones, my local framer (and formerly art shop). Photo comes from this blog. A certain grandness and width seems essential for the idea to work - not one to try at home, then.

Stairway to nowhere

One thing leads to another, and my travels round the art-internet this morning (via the work of Kristina Jansson) brought me to the story of the Winchester House in San Jose, California.
It was built by the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune ("the gun that won the West") on the advice of a spiritualist. Because the "architects" were the spirits that she consulted, the house is full of strange rooms, staircases and doors that lead nowhere, etc. The spiderweb motif and the number 13 are everywhere. Read more about it here (and how it has become metaphor here) and see pix here.

Art I like - Hubert Kiecol

Steps and houses - minimal and solid - and he does airy-spacey sculptural work too. See more here.

He lives and works in Cologne. His gallery's website says:
"By the early 1980s the artist had already developed a personal idiom marked by exactness and a compelling presence. His sculptures are taken out of an architecturally-functional context and exist as forms which take on a new dimension through reduction and proportion - supported by his use of "concrete." The works on paper suggest a spatiality which is achieved by deep black planes like cut-out geometric shapes placed on a white plane."

Hmm. But I do like his steps! Thanks, Jo, for finding the postcard of "Nine Steps":

Stairs

When the idea of the fabric stairs as the focus of my display space took root, I started looking more closely at stairs - and at spaces under stairs.Mention "a room under the stairs" and people always - always! - say "oh yes Harry Potter". Which upset me at first (you mean it's been done to death already? it's derivative, old hat?) but the other side of the coin is that if this is what people think of ("small and dusty, and lots of spiders"), how do you use that expectation - either to build on it, or to subvert it (preferably the latter, of course).

"Under the stairs" also often conveys the "glory hole" jumble of unwanted items. Or perhaps, carefully organised storage. Use of unused, perhaps unusable, space. Call it "dead space" if you will...
Perhaps it intrigues me because I spent my formative years in a house with no basement and no attic. After which, it took only a short while of living in basement rooms (the haunt of poor students) to make "upstairs" very desirable. Now I live in the top two floors of a house converted into flats, and what would be my understair cupboard is in the downstairs flat (surely there's a metaphor in that...).

Another thing that makes the understair area so fascinating is my lifelong love of "cupboard beds" - the idea of having a cosy room-within-a-room, with favourite books to hand, completely private. This goes back to some story read in childhood, no doubt. A cosy and safe place in which to read scary stories. It's the "tiny house" thing ... the "child cave" phenomenon.

Yet another cupboard-under-the-stairs story is of my winter in Menorca, living in an old stone farmhouse with no water or electricity or heating, and very little money. We would keep warm of an evening by taking our chairs and gas lamp and books into the cupboard under the stairs, which got reasonably cosy - and then it was time to jump into the icy bed. (Ah, we were young...)

You might recognise these stairs - even if you've never seen them before -
Yes, the piece is by Rachel Whiteread. Another variation on the "back stairs" design?

Stairs

Stairs are still on my mind. These glass ones are a feature of Apple stores everywhere -And these, very perilous, at Las Pozas, the house in the jungle built by millionaire eccentric art collector Edward James -
Their perilousness is made very real by a report from a friend who was in the neighbourhood but didn't visit: "the rains had made getting around in the garden treacherous due to sliminess of mosses growing on the concrete walks and particularly on the many stairs [no hand rails or guard rails] and injuries from falls were being reported."

But would you go up them (and down again) under the best of conditions?

Yet more stairs!

At the Handel House museum -
and at Keats House -

Stair photography

Graphic image by Sonia Melnikova, one of many interesting artists in the "Art: Recycled and Found" 2006 show here.

Her website shows it's one of a series -
She trained as an architect in Russia and now lives in San Francisco.