Mouldings are a thing you know. The kind of thing that keeps me up at night. In the past week I have being putting way too many neurons into the most important detail no one ever notices in a home. To me it was a sphinxes’ riddle: how to make an original moulding so sparse it is both traditional and modern, so simple it bends the mind that it has not been used, while also keeping it grand without a whiff of pecuniary pressure. My Eureka moment was courtesy of placating my man by going to a run of the mill moulding outfit in the neverneverlands of Ottawa. I wanted to go to say I went, saw and was vanquished by curlicued gibberish. Instead my eyes dropped to the stack at the very bottom of the wall where all the extra pieces lay in bulk ready to be fillers to pump up the volume of the aforementioned curdled wall candy. The moment I started stacking these innocent blocks this way and that, my inner child, that beautiful goddess, found me.
As soon as the lines formed I thought of Mondrian who wrote in the very year our home was built “Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man.” What’s good enough for Piet is good enough for me. I dare you to call my sculptural baseboard a dust catcher.