writings
observations, parallels and musings on the coincidences between aesthetic, artistic and consumer culture.
Writing Home.
Carrying everything we are, physically and emotionally we moved into this estate. Originally built between 1890 and 1906, we questioned what paths led for us to be here, our combined heritage of Maltese, English, Iranian and Irish. The landlady, once a sexual health nurse, sat us down and told us she had purchased the flat some 20 years ago from a lady who ran a brothel. I thought about how they’d met. She was now happy running a B&B in Bournemouth, ‘because that’s obviously what you do once you retire from owning a brothel’.
This is a happy flat, my mother could always tell the history of a place lived in as soon as she walked into it. The house her and my father had built went on to see more families who struggled to stay together. She worries if they upset the house. Little prayers whispered when my father and I drove past it after he collected me from the airport on my visits home.
Malta is one of the most beautiful places you’ll ever see in your life, I often describe it as an Italian Arabic cultural lovechild. If the English had never been there, more Maltese people would probably appreciate that sentiment. It’s only an anecdote, a verbal picture of a salty island steeped in hills of intricately carved limestone, golden weeds, floral prickly pears and dust. It’s unimaginably hard to leave every visit and some people never do.
This time, returning to the retired brothel, the flat softens the blow from leaving my country. Grateful for the opportunities this city is soaked in, ungrateful for the rain and then grateful again for how the moan of weather seems to be the single most unifying topic across this ‘united kingdom’. I spent the last ten years looking for Malta in people and things. Now, up 67 steps, my golden fields are replicated in wooden floorboards. Trades were made of seascapes for roofscapes, carob trees for silver birches, limestone for redbrick, real oranges for really good coffee and the sun for the rain.
Hanging like rags, the walls are draped in persian carpets and paintings, another home we are unlikely to be able to cross safely. Home is brought into the flat through carpets, clothing, coasters, tea glasses, cups, mantel piece shrines and music. Reds, golds, rich greens, oranges, pinks, blues all perfectly woven into each other representing our joining stories.
A London summer’s evening spent brewing black tea, cardamom, saffron and cinnamon with Nabaat, sticks of bright orange crystallised sugar laced with saffron, on the saucer next to the delicately engraved glasses. We toast to our health, a fridge full of food, four walls and a roof.
.
The beauty of domestic objects
Vases and glasses have long held symbolic and functional roles in art history, often representing themes of abundance, fragility, and domestic life in still life paintings. In classical art, they were depicted as symbols of wealth or used to convey spiritual (often associated with the Virgin Mary in the west) and allegorical meanings, while in modern art, they became subjects for exploring form, light, and materiality. Artists have depicted these objects to experiment with composition, metaphor and abstraction, emphasising the beauty and structure of each day.
Take Peach and Glass 1927, Georgia O’keefe
Exploring the simplicity of the composition, just a peach and a glass, Georgia O’Keeffe’s interest in stripping down forms to their essentials creates a calming yet curious mood. This reflective approach allows for a meditative focus on shape, colour, and texture. The peach could symbolise vitality and life, while the glass might represent clarity, fragility, or transparency, qualities that O’Keeffe might have been interested in highlighting in everyday objects.
In 1927, when this painting was completed, O’Keeffe was seen to be revisiting the still life tradition in a modern way. By focusing on ordinary objects, she was engaging with a genre that historically symbolised the fleetingness of life, material pleasures, and abundance, often through symbols of fruit. O’Keeffe’s emphasis on form and simplicity reclaims still life from its traditional connotations and injects it with a modernist sense of experimentation with space and form.
Fast forward to Irving Penn’s photography for Clinique, as highlighted in Pauline Brown's Aesthetic Intelligence, revolutionised the brand by elevating everyday beauty products into objects of desire and art. Penn’s minimalist, high-contrast images echoed the modernist focus on purity and form. Both artists stripped down their subjects to their essentials transforming them into iconic images that transcended their functional nature.
Penn’s work for Clinique had a profound impact on the brand, helping it to stand out in a crowded market by aligning its identity with clean, sophisticated aesthetics. This strategy created a visual language of non-descriminatory simplicity and open market elegance that directly resonated with consumers. Similarly, O’Keeffe's art challenged viewers to appreciate the subtle beauty in commonplace objects, reshaping how people perceived those items and making something ordinary, extraordinary.
In both cases, the artistry behind the depiction redefined the subject’s cultural value, demonstrating how even the simplest objects, when stripped to their essence, can be transformed into powerful symbols of iconography.