Ha 259 aof final

ANTIQUES OF THE FUTURE

A shore success Surrounded by the driftwood bounty of the sea, artist Kirsty Elson turns her beach finds into miniature studies of Cornish scenes FEATURE rosanna morris PHOTOGRAPHS PAUL RYAN-GOFF

left Collectors are clamouring to get their hands on Kirsty’s simple yet charming driftwood sculptures, like this detached cottage on a harbour wall right Kirsty in her bright, white living room where she displays her works on a driftwood dresser made by her husband Steve below Adding the finishing touches to a row of beach huts

S

eagulls swoop overhead and a gentle breeze stirs honeysuckle tendrils coiled around an arch as artist Kirsty Elson sits on a homemade bench in front of a slate-fronted house, painting. With the slightest flick of a thin brush, tiny windows appear on the block of driftwood that is her canvas, completing the row of whitewashed fishermen’s cottages she is working on.

‘I love it when I can work outside in the summer,’ she says, putting down her brush and making her way into the house.

Inside, she moves into her white, sun-drenched dining room where a number of her works are arranged, fittingly, on a driftwood dresser. ‘I needed something to display my work on at shows, so my husband Steve built the dresser for me.’ Rows of weathered cottages and colourful beach huts sit happily on its chunky white shelves.

Despite studying illustration at Cambridge School of Art, Kirsty didn’t do anything creative for a living for quite a few years. ‘After I graduated I had a couple of pretty rubbish

72 H&A JUNE 2014

AUGUST 2014 H&A 73

ANTIQUES OF THE FUTURE

‘To Kirsty, a piece of driftwood isn’t simply a bit of marine debris thrown up by the sea’ jobs,’ she says. ‘I ran a petrol station at one point. I started to think I wouldn’t be able to make art my career.’ That was until she moved back to the West Country – where she’d grown up on the Devon coast – to have children.

‘When my son Buddy turned two I decided I needed to earn some money. I applied for a job as a postman but they wouldn’t have me,’ she says. So rather than posting cards through letterboxes, she started making them, using small pieces of painted driftwood to create the pictures.

When her youngest son Herbie, now seven, started school three years ago, she had more time to make and her three-dimensional sculptures began to take shape.

‘I found a piece of wood that looked a bit like a house,’ she says. ‘Steve suggested I add a little roof to it, which I fitted with rusty nails and these became chimneys.’ Her vocation was cemented when she won a place to exhibit at The Contemporary Craft Festival in Bovey Tracey in 2012 and, according to organiser Sarah James, created something of a buzz. Since then demand has steadily grown and her little sculptures are now sold in galleries across the country (the Yorkshire Sculpture Park shop is the latest to stock her).

Her works are so popular she can’t make them fast enough.

‘I struggle to keep up with the demand,’ she says. ‘I stopped taking orders at the beginning of this year because I was getting more than I could produce.’

finding inspiration

above Kirsty assembles her models at a shabby table in an upstairs room of her Liskeard cottage left Old washers and nails come in handy for making chimneys, lampposts and bicycles right The little houses echo the paintings of 19th-century Cornish fisherman and native artist Alfred Wallis 74 H&A AUGUST 2014

To Kirsty, a piece of driftwood isn’t simply a bit of marine debris thrown up by the sea. A block of wave-battered pallet or post could be a sailing boat, a lighthouse, a beach hut, a whale, a harbour wall or a row of fishermen’s cottages.

‘I am completely led by the materials I work with,’ she says.

‘Once I’ve found a piece of wood I like, the idea starts evolving and I make up scenes. After that, it doesn’t take long to make a piece. Something small and simple may take an hour, but the large sculptures can be a day or two.’

Kirsty’s creations echo that of 19th-century Cornish fisherman and naive artist Alfred Wallis, who painted seascapes and regularly depicted houses. Her work shares his childlike simplicity and inexact proportions. ‘I always make the doors much bigger than everything else. I don’t know why,’ she says. Her palette of colours is reminiscent of Wallis too – primary blues, inky blacks, sludgy greys, off-whites and a sage green. While she uses emulsion paint to colour her creations, she is most happy when the wood has its original paint, the more worn the better. She loves blue most of all.

‘If I find a blue bit with white on it I can use it as the sea.’

The briefest glance around Kirsty’s Liskeard cottage tells you that this is the home of a true hunter-gatherer.

above A chunky piece of wood has been used effectively as a harbour wall, which comes complete with a bench and a telescope left With their primary colours and neutral shades, the coastal studies look particularly impressive on whitewashed shelving below Kirsty carefully dabs on windows

AUGUST 2014 H&A 75

‘Kirsty unloads most of her haul into her workshop in the garden where she does the messy jobs of sanding, sawing and drilling’

above Driftwood with original flaked blue paint works wonders as the rippling sea right Kirsty decides what she’s going to make once she’s found the right piece of wood

Everywhere you look, there is something fashioned from found objects, most washed ashore. A ladder propped in her living room is her favourite beach find, while there’s an oar on the stairs, several driftwood-framed mirrors hung on walls and, on the landing, another piece of driftwood furniture (a cabinet built by Steve) on top of which is moored a steamship Kirsty made from a large block of sea-worn oak.

In her dining room, a black rucksack covered in sand lies on the floor. ‘That’s what I use when I go to the beach,’ says Kirsty. ‘I can fit most things in it.’ Once a week, Kirsty combs her local beaches with Steve, Buddy, now 11, and Herbie.

Sometimes, when the weather is good, they combine this with a swim or a paddle in their Canadian canoe. ‘We rarely come back empty-handed,’ she says. ‘The boys find lots of Lego and they’ve decorated their den with nets and buoys.’

Her most fruitful hunting ground is Whitsand Bay on the Rame Peninsula, about 10 miles away. ‘The shape of the beach and the direction it faces mean it catches more debris than other beaches,’ she says. ‘The only problem is that the car park is up on a hill so you have to drag things up to it.’ Spoils usually include paint-flecked bits of boats, old signs and sheets of ply.

work in progress

COLLECTING KIRSTY ELSON SARAH JAMES, MANAGER, THE CONTEMPORARY CRAFT FESTIVAL, BOVEY TRACEY

‘To say Kirsty’s work is in demand is a considerable understatement. Her driftwood sculptures have a subtle, naive quality with an ingenuity that is appreciated by tens of thousands of fans. The work has a quiet charm that has a clever mix of nostalgia and humour, drawing you back into a simple life that we all long for. Collectors can’t get enough of her. She works in small batches and when I’m lucky enough to have some work to sell in my shop there is a veritable stampede as customers try to get their hands on a piece. Messages and emails pour in and within 30 minutes they are all sold.

It is quite a phenomenon. Buy now – if you can.’

76 H&A AUGUST 2014

Kirsty tends to unload most of her haul into her little workshop in the garden where she does the messy jobs of sanding, sawing and drilling. She then moves into the house to add the details unless, of course, the sun beckons her into the garden. Upstairs in the spare bedroom is Kirsty’s work station – a pine table covered in superglue and paint on which is scattered tester emulsion pots amid brushes, old scissors, a vintage toolbox (a present from Herbie) and a cigar box full of rusty nails, screws and springs that she uses for bicycles, post boxes, lampposts and benches. ‘A German family who bought some of my work while staying in St Mawes sent me the box of bits,’ says Kirsty. ‘I received a package of nails and things from Australia once, too.’

At her table, she carefully assembles and glues her pieces of wood to form the structure and then she’ll attach doors and other features, such as tiny scraps of fabric on a washing line, before finishing facades and windows with a lick of paint. A hair dryer on the floor is used to speed up the drying. Well, with so many fans eager to get their hands on a Kirsty Elson work, speed is of the essence.

See more of Kirsty’s work at kirstyelson.co.uk. Prices range from £30 for a detached cottage to £300 for a larger piece