Tara Donovan

A friend has just pointed me in the direction of Tara Donovan. Her work is so simple and so clever created out of everyday items, pencils, straws, Styrofoam cups, but repeated to create landscapes and microcosms. It has got me thinking.

Kinder

We recently returned from a wonderful adventure in Japan. As well as spending time in the large cities and zooming around on the bullet trains, we had some beautiful and quiet times high up in the mountains in tiny villages surrounded by bamboo and cedar wood forests.
It was high summer over there and very hot and humid. The baby was a trooper and took everything in his stride. One day in Kyoto we were hot and getting cranky as we wandered around in the heat trying to get back to our cool tatami mat room so the baby could have a crawl around after being clipped into a sweaty pram for hours. I saw a tiny hand painted sign in both Japanese and English saying there was a children’s bookstore so we went to have a look. On the first floor of a building was a lovely bookstore filled with all the classics translated into Japanese. We were told there was a kindergarten upstairs and we could take the baby there to play with some other children. It was so beautiful, two grandmotherly women played with another baby in a cool clear room filled with beautiful handmade toys. It was just perfect.