Documenting the creative partnership of Robin Miller and Kym Hepworth, husband and wife artists from Savannah, GA, creating mixed media assemblages inspired by found materials from a bygone era.
inthecrystalpalace is a proud member of team killercool on Etsy. Here's a look at the team treasuries we recently curated during the month of May on Etsy:
"Time, twisting on and on, always taking away and never bringing anything back, could kill people years before they extricated themselves from their bodies and flew off to God. I had heard her float through the hallways of the house, whispering the names of her children as she blew out the lamps. John Randal, Mary Elizabeth, Martha. It sounded like prayer, like some sort of invocation. I'd been in a Catholic church once, down on toward Natchez, and I'd heard the same sound when the priests approached the altar, muttering the sounds that would bring Christ back to them.
Kym Hepworth / Reliquary / 2007 / mixed media / 8 3/8 x 6 1/8 3 1/4 in.
I didn't much care for that sort of thing, and I had no faith that a priest could work such magic, but I found myself praying that someday, maybe, Carrie McGavock would perform that miracle, that time would get all wrapped up on itself and confused, and that those children would walk the hallways with their mother again. There was beauty in that woman. Not in her pain, but in the part of her obscured by the pain and the black crinkly dress and the black thread of time.
Kym Hepworth / The Widow / 2010 / mixed media / 13 1/8 x 9 7/8 x 4 1/4 in.
I saw a young and beautiful woman, a woman who could lift burdens and redeem men. I wanted to be redeemed, I wanted to be absolved. And I wanted that woman, the angel who walked in the cemetery among her dead children and kissed their gravestones when she thought no one was looking, to be the one doing the redeeming. I had no name for that, no word. Just a feeling."
Very Victorian was curated by somewhereintime4u - thanks for including our Fatal Beauty assemblage! Please visit somwhereintime4u's Etsy shop and check out their antique, vintage and handmade creations!
Darkening Sky was curated by lindanorton - thanks for including our assemblage, The Widow! Please visit lindanorton's Etsy shop to see her lovely, ethereal paintings and prints!
Here's a link to the treasury on Etsy. Please click on the items and visit the shops!
Welcome! We recently opened our new Etsy shop and now it's time to get this blog started. Let's begin with sources of inspiration. Robin and I kicked around a few other names for the shop before choosing In The Crystal Palace. We wanted a name with a clear Victorian association, and something that suggested a poetic, mysterious, and other-worldly atmosphere. We are also huge fans of Joseph Cornell's (1903-1972) work. His construction (below) ties these ideas together beautifully:
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Pink Palace), c. 1946-48, Construction, 10 x 16 7/16 x 3 1/4 in.
As luck would have it, we went to Barnes and Noble in Hilton Head, SC earlier this week and bought Bill Bryson's (1951 -) new book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Can you guess what subject Mr. Bryson writes about in his first chapter? The Crystal Palace. Here's an excerpt:
"In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul's Cathedrals. For the short time of its existence, it was the biggest building on Earth. Known formally as the Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, it was incontestably magnificent, but all the more so for being so sudden, so startlingly glassy, so gloriously and unexpectedly there. Douglas Jerrold, a columnist for the weekly magazine Punch, dubbed it the Crystal Palace, and the name stuck.
The finished building was precisely 1,851 feet long (in celebration of the year), 408 feet across, and almost 110 feet high along its central spine--spacious enough to enclose a much admired avenue of elms that would otherwise have had to be felled. Because of its size, the structure required a lot of inputs--293,655 panes of glass, 33,000 iron trusses, and tens of thousands of feet of wooden flooring--yet thanks to Paxton's methods [Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) English architect, designed the Crystal Palace], the final cost came in at an exceedingly agreeable £80,000. From start to finish, the work took just under thirty-five weeks. St. Paul's Cathedral had taken thirty-five years.
The Crystal Palace was at once the world's largest building and its lightest, most ethereal one. Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but to someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling--indeed, giddying. The arriving visitor's first sight of the Exhibition Hall from afar, glinting and transparent, is really beyond our imagining. It would have seemed as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a soap bubble. To anyone arriving at Hyde Park, the first sight of the Crystal Palace, floating above the trees, sparkling in sunshine, would have been a moment of knee-weakening slendor."
And then it all burned down . . .
Watching the blaze, Winston Churchill said, "This is the end of an age."
