{"id":29274,"date":"2025-09-21T22:26:16","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T21:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/?p=29274"},"modified":"2025-09-27T11:04:25","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T10:04:25","slug":"the-shape-of-a-room-a-gentle-reckoning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/the-shape-of-a-room-a-gentle-reckoning\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shape of a Room: A Gentle Reckoning."},"content":{"rendered":"

Coffee in hand, I opened one of my favourite books, Axel Vervoordt\u2019s\u00a0Wabi Interiors<\/a>. Have you heard the expression Wabi Sabi? A Japanese aesthetic and worldview. It values what is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. The phrase joins two roots:<\/p>\n

First used in poetry,\u00a0wabi\u00a0referred to loneliness or poverty; it later came to describe a simple, humble beauty. Under the influence of Zen Buddhism, with its sensibilities around solitude, imperfection and simplicity,\u00a0wabi\u00a0shifted away from suffering toward intentional simplicity.<\/p>\n

Sabi first meant something like withered, worn, chill – a sense of desolation and again under influence of Zen Buddhism, evolved into an aesthetic of quietness, patina, and the dignity of age.<\/p>\n

Together, wabi-sabi is a way of seeing. A cracked tea bowl repaired with gold (kintsugi) is wabi-sabi. Moss on an old stone wall. A linen cloth frayed at the edge. Rooms that breathe, objects and materials placed with presence rather than for show, materials that show their life. In Wabi Inspirations<\/a>, Vervoordt is speaking specifically of wabi – the simplicity and presence – rather than the fuller concept of wabi-sabi.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

A room that breathes. A\u00a0beloved\u00a0bowl with a chip. Light falling in the late afternoon on linen. I was sitting with the\u00a0book, looking at\u00a0pictures of\u00a0a house once owned by Picasso and later touched by Vervoordt.\u00a0The patina on the doorframe.\u00a0A door left ajar that only the right light knows how to enter. Every object placed as if it remembers something, as if it chose to be there.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, I spent time with a teacher, more conduit\u00a0than coach, who\u00a0gave words to what I\u2019d always felt: objects choose their place.\u00a0The words\u00a0felt like recognition.\u00a0What matters are\u00a0the relationships in the room, not the decor. The lamp and the window, the chair and the wall, the mug and the morning. Even the silence seems to have direction. The spaces\u00a0feel alive. There\u2019s nothing performative about them, and what a relief that is.<\/p>\n

Like a forest. Grounded presence. Permission. Spaces you walk into and know exactly where to sit, because the room already knew.<\/p>\n

I find spaces like that reassuring, probably because I can get a bit cluttered and love it when a room is spacious and intentional, with objects and natural forms that embody or remember their nature. A stone, a hand formed\u00a0vessel, a wooden bowl that still smells like the tree it came from. Bringing the outside in, or taking us from inside to out. It\u2019s not about being tidy or minimalist,\u00a0but\u00a0attunement. And when\u00a0a space\u00a0holds attunement,\u00a0much like when a person holds attunement,\u00a0something inside can settle.<\/p>\n

I was minded of the work by Andrew Szczech<\/a>. The crackle as memory, colour emerging from within, like minerals rising through stone or breath warming metal. Each piece feels touched by time and left to cure, inviting you to enter\u00a0–\u00a0like the Axel rooms.<\/p>\n

And then I recalled a conversation between Anselm Kiefer and Tim Marlow<\/a>,\u00a0(which I referenced in a piece I wrote for\u00a0MoneyWeek.<\/a>) Kiefer in his vast warehouse of memory: ash, lead, straw, myth. Diamonds cast into dark soil, canvases flooded with molten lead. Even now, it sounds like scripture – of matter. Kiefer does not paint images; he builds memory into mass, pressing history into surface.<\/p>\n

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