BY AIMEE FARRELL | 27 AUGUST 2024
The scaled-down models, aviaries and doll’s houses are the highlight at Homo Faber, the Luca Guadagnino art-directed craft fair opening this weekend.
Humans have been modelling their lives in miniature since antiquity. Rendered on a Lilliputian scale, even the most mundane object sparks wonder. The City of London’s postwar overhaul unearthed tiny Roman pottery and mini medieval bronzes; mudlarkers have found troves of teeny 13th and 14th-century plates and bowls along the banks of the river Thames. In Europe, the tradition has its beginnings in the Bavarian “baby houses” of the 16th century, and the miniature rooms known as cabinet houses in which 17th-century Dutch merchants and their wives showed off their collections of cosmopolitan artefacts.
The playful allure of life in miniature has never waned for Eric Lansdown. The 72-year-old began making aviaries and decorative cabinets for a San Franciscan antiques shop back in 1973. Now living in a 1,000-year-old fortress in the south of France, he creates elaborate structures that imaginatively conjure everything from French Renaissance châteaux to iterations of East Anglia’s Bridge of Sighs and the Brighton Pavilion, complete with domed towers and trompe l’oeil ivory.
“It’s whatever strikes my fancy,” says Lansdown, who is in the middle of making a triumphal bridge that’s an ode to Ukraine. “The structure becomes a canvas for me to paint the ambience of a building — right down to the stains and cracks in the old stone.” He has spent recent months perfecting a series of Renaissance dormer windows — moulded and cast in polyurethane resin and wood, with their own hand-cast pewter finials. Even the windowpanes of his aviaries are wrought from wire and copper mesh that’s woven and soldered by hand.
Eric Lansdown has been creating spectacular miniature aviaries for decades, and is now passing his skills on to a new generation of apprentices. Lansdown has his sights firmly set on a miniature future. His profits help fund a reforestation project in the foothills of the Haut-Languedoc Regional National Park surrounding his studio and, as well as exhibiting his cabinet houses at Homo Faber, he’s part of the organisation’s official programme offering apprenticeships next year, in the hope that these specialist skills aren’t lost to the annals of time.
Though small, the mightiest miniature art invites you to stop, look and remember — life can be at its most lovely when it’s little.
“Homo Faber 2024: The Journey of Life”, September 1-10 at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice; homofaber.com
Lansdown Arts 