Individual by Jessica Bellef

Author:Jessica Bellef
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Sandra stands in her narrow hallway, which could quickly turn into an obstacle course if she parked her bike inside. Her home was filled to the brim with her creations, as seen overleaf.

A bright, welcoming tribute

A bathroom cabinet filled with quirky packaging hangs on the wall beside a bird etching by Bridget Farmer (above); a soft sculpture in a human form by French artist Nathalie Lété looks towards an eclectic mood wall (opposite).

Inspiration also came to Sandra in the form of vintage packaging, children’s books from decades past and the folk traditions of faraway places. Part of her childhood was spent on the Croatian island of Brac, where her parents grew up. Sandra soaked up every little detail of the Eastern European way of life in the early 1980s, from the colour palette of embroidered chair covers to the patterns on her cousin’s exercise books and the decorative foil wrapped around a salami stick. Observe the Croatian national costume, with its intricate embroidery and lacework, and you get a sense of the kinds of patterns Sandra had stored in her memory bank. It is no surprise that the shade of bright red featured in the costume also happened to be Sandra’s favourite colour and a hue that was repeated throughout her spaces.

Sandra’s home was textured with a village’s worth of unusual characters. Illustrated faces peered out from picture frames, while little flat plywood humans and anthropomorphic cushions monitored the daily happenings from their positions. Some of the furniture looked as if it could jolt into action and teeter right across the room at any moment. Sandra’s brother built the unique plywood dining table for her after she sent him an image of a Moroccan table found in the pages of The World of Interiors magazine. The tongue-in-cheek design, delivered to Sandra as a flat pack, was usually topped off with a bright tablecloth and always surrounded by a quartet of timber dining chairs, one of which was painted in her favourite jaunty red.

Sandra was always a busy creative. Commissions steadily rolled in from publishers and retailers, and there was usually a gallery exhibition or two that she was working towards. She spent a lot of her time in her studio a few suburbs away, but cooking at home for friends and rearranging her collections were also favourite pastimes. Sandra would often tweak her two mood walls, one in the front room and the other near the kitchen, adding her latest inspirational finds and things that made her smile. She would arrange two- and three-dimensional elements—such as old masks, aged medical diagrams and small ceramic objects—mashing together a mix of concepts to create something new. This assemblage approach to wall decoration gave Sandra’s small space an added layer of texture and youthful energy; the arrangements changed, but you could be sure they would always include quirky folk and cheeky characters.

Those closest to Sandra say that her life can be defined by ‘her art and her big heart’, and we will always have her village of faces to remind us of her warm, funny ways.

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