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 #4 - The Things That Leave
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Hi there Reader, Welcome, come inside the Wayward Cottage today. Well, as it once was fifteen years ago. We had to enter through the basement, go up the basement stairs, and break through a wall that once was a door when we first arrived. But luckily, the front door is usable now. Come, let’s meander upstairs. I want to show you something. It’s a beautiful clawfoot tub, mostly hidden behind faux brick paneling. I’m not sure why it was tucked away like that, but my husband and I removed it and dragged it into another room so that we could gut and renovate the bathroom. And there it sat, for weeks, haunting me. We weren’t going to keep it. Mostly because the fixtures to replumb it properly were prohibitively expensive for us. So it was going to be rehomed. But, in the meantime, it felt like something too beautiful to let go. Yet let go of it we must. Then one day the insulators we had hired were coming in to spray. I could hear them pulling up into the yard. In a moment of pure desperation, I set up a timer on my camera and jumped into the tub. This was the image that resulted. My husband said it was creepy. He loved it. It felt…intense to me. For me, it held all of the struggle of that renovation process in a single shot. And then we let the bathtub go. Eventually, the bathtub its new home. But for one afternoon, before it disappeared from our lives, I got to see what had been haunting me. Sometimes that’s how an image begins for me. Not with an idea, exactly. More like a feeling that something is asking to be looked at a little longer. A bathtub. A ladder in the woods. Light falling strangely across a wall. Something ordinary that won’t quite leave me alone. So I make a story. What do you see? ​ ​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, 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...
Hi there Reader, Today I'm taking you up into the woods. There are no paths there that the deer haven't made. Instead there are ridges and rock formations, an abandoned house, traces of a forgotten road, and eventually, a swamp. I've spent over 15 years wandering and photographing these woods - occasionally being lucky enough to find a morel mushroom or two for dinner. The woods themselves feel full of history and stories, waiting to be discovered. One fall afternoon in 2013 I found a rickety...