Decorative textile artist Helen Banzhaf’s sense of colour is heavily influenced by her collections of early 20th-century Art Deco pottery and furniture, and her south London mid-Victorian terraced house provides the perfect place in which to display both these and her unique pieces of machine-embroidered art. ‘My house, with all its carefully selected ‘clutter’, is at the root of my creativity,’ she says.
Helen and her family moved to their home in Lee Green, south-east London, in 1982 to be near to their young children’s childminder. ‘The house was unmodernised. We painted the walls, but it has been a slow work in progress ever since, and it’s still evolving, still changing.’ Helen – whose creations include bags, earrings and framed embroidered textiles – works from her neatly organised attic studio, where she makes oil pastel studies, and from the dining room table on her Bernina sewing machine.
Like many creative people, Helen puts together little tabletop vignettes, which are dotted around the house. ‘They’re often inspired by an image, a colour or a venue, and placed on a piece of furniture, a shelf or window sill or tucked into a corner. They may stay unchanged, frozen in time, or be moved in an ever-changing tableau. Doing this has become a habit and is now almost an unconscious event in itself.’
Central to most of Helen’s vignettes are pieces of 1920s and 1930s pottery. ‘It’s their colour that I love the most,’ she explains. ‘And the way the sun lights up these hues delights and makes me happy. They’re not particularly valuable, and I’ve bought them forever: there are a few Clarice Cliff pieces, but mostly they’re a motley bunch of unknown or insignificant provenance, but I love them especially for that.’
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Among this vibrant medley is a small batch of Shelley pottery, mostly designed by Walter Slater, but including a stylish and very successful Harmony Artware range by Eric Slater. There are also a few bright Crown Devon pieces, cheap and cheerful at the time Helen picked them up, but now very collectable.
Other once-familiar names include Flaxman Ware and Art Deco Wadeheaths; ornamental jugs and vases from Myott England; and Crown Ducal from the Gordon Pottery designed by Charlotte Rhead. Many of these Stoke-on-Trent companies were longstanding ceramic household names, producing tableware that was fashionable in its time but, like many British potteries, slowly folded in the mid 1900s.
Helen singles out a jaunty jug with an ear-like handle in a black, red and orange design on a cream background that has inspired a favourite embroidery and the design for a small carpet that sits in the front room. ‘Sadly it’s only marked as ‘Made in England’. I’d love to know who made the jug. It’s given me so much pleasure and inspiration, and still does,’ she says.
Other artists’ work features throughout the house, with paintings, sculpture and pottery by friends and acquaintances, and, as in a gallery, the house itself somehow fades into the background to show off its contents.
With walls painted white, nothing overwhelms or detracts from the furnishings: many are simple 1920s, 1930s and 1940s cupboards, tallboys or sideboards, unfashionable and cheap at their time of purchase, but now barely recognisable since Helen has transformed them by painting or sanding them back to their original wood. Floors are sanded or painted to match the walls, while even the garden has white painted fences, turning south London into a Greek island.
helenbanzhaf.co.uk
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