Occasional dispatches from an artist and writer about making things, noticing things, and following strange threads through art, story, landscape, and the creative life. Sometimes I'll leave you an image to carry away.
🕯️ Haunted Lantern #2 - The Things That Remain
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Hi there Reader, Welcome back to my Wayward Cottage at the edge of the woods. Before the Wayward Cottage, I lived in an old carriage house that had once belonged to a grand estate. Think: questionable kitchen in an old horse stall, bedroom in the hayloft. And more giant spider visitors than I care to recount. The place was rather wayward as well, now that I come to think of it. 😏 The mansion itself was long gone. All that was left was an empty field. There wasn't even a foundation. But this wall remained: Back in 2009 I must have photographed this wall dozens of times: my cat perched on the wall, friends sitting on them as well, people emerging from between the columns. At the time, I think I was fascinated by the strangeness of them: an entrance to a place that no longer existed. Evidence of something much larger, with the thing itself missing. I’ve been looking through these old photographs recently, and this one stopped me. Because sixteen years later, I’m writing a story set in a landscape scattered with the remnants of a civilization its inhabitants barely remember. They live among old structures. They use things whose original purposes have been forgotten. The world that made them is mostly gone, but its shape is still there. And, when I see these photos, I realize that apparently I've been circling that idea for a very long time. There is something that fascinates me about remnants. A wall without its house. A road whose destination has disappeared. An object separated from the person who once held it. The way something absent can still determine the shape of what remains. Sometimes I think making art is less about inventing our obsessions than discovering we’ve been circling the same ones all along. So now I offer this to you: Haunted Lanterns are occasional dispatches from my Wayward Cottage — notes on making things, noticing things, and following strange threads through art, story, landscape, and the creative life. Subscribers sometimes receive a little something to carry away. If you’d like the next Lantern delivered to you, you can join me here.
Happy wandering, Jen |
Jen Kiaba
Occasional dispatches from an artist and writer about making things, noticing things, and following strange threads through art, story, landscape, and the creative life. Sometimes I'll leave you an image to carry away.
Hi there Reader, There are some nights where sleep is a threshold that refuses to be crossed. You might find yourself drifting ever closer to the edge of that liminal space where waking thoughts dissipate into the strangeness of dreams - and then suddenly you jolt back towards wakefulness. You can circle back again, perhaps looking for another way to cross into the land of twilight. Some nights you may find yourself there. On others, you may find yourself haunting those darkest hours, eyelids...
Hi there Reader, Back before the Wayward Cottage, in the days of the wayside carriage house, there were many a night where I found that I could not sleep. Perhaps it was the wind that whistled through a door in the bedroom that opened, inexplicably, out onto the roof. Maybe it was the moonlight that would peek in through that door. Either way, there were plenty of sleepless nights. And so I donned an vintage nightgown, wandered downstairs, and take eerie self portraits. Like one does,...
Hi there Reader, Come take a walk with me today, a ways down the road from the Wayward Cottage.There’s an old abandoned property there, slowly being reclaimed by the woods. Years ago, when the place was still inhabited, an artist installed a piano beneath towering trees. Above it hung a chandelier of illuminated glass orbs. Inside the piano he placed a speaker, and for a single day it seemed as though the piano itself were playing a haunting sonata. And then everyone left. The doors were...