Solving Puzzles, Making Music
How Kathleen Quigley turns living spaces into art
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Home Sweet Home
Our friend and ace interiors artist Kathleen Quigley spent this week with us here on Sanibel Island. She arrived the day after Gentle Giant movers delivered furniture and boxes of stuff from our storage unit in Cambridge, Mass.
At mid-week over supper, I told Kathleen she reminded me of Thing One and Thing Two in The Cat in the Hat. Not the part where they mess up the house, but the happy ending when then swoop in to tidy, arrange, and make everything perfect in time for the return of Sally and her brother’s parents.
Kathleen has worked as a visual artist, furniture maker, and sculptor. She created the Art Therapy program at Children’s Hospital Boston. She hosts retreats at her dramatic A-frame home in North Carolina, just up the hill from a meditation yurt she built by a stream.
When we spoke here in my Lab early this morning, before her ride back to RSW, Kathleen told me she has been helping people to arrange living spaces ever since childhood.
I asked her how she arrived at what feels to me like the perfect arrangement of photos and text poems by my Dad on the wall of the Lab. She explained it this way:
I allow the pictures to speak to me. I knew I wanted to begin with my favorite picture of you and Darlene on your wedding day, and then it just proceeded from there…It’s like putting a puzzle together.
It’s also like music, she added:
It’s letting the creative process just have its flow and trying to stay out of the way of my thinking how it should go. I let the words and the images speak to me and show me their pattern.
To be honest, I was nervous when all our stuff showed up from Massachusetts. I have enjoyed the empty white bookshelves and the mainly empty walls since we returned to Sanibel last month.
By letting my things speak to her about where they wanted to be, Kathleen made this room more my own than I ever could have hoped.
When a room feels this right, you can’t wait to walk through the door.
That’s the way my Lab feels this evening, thanks to the artistry of a dynamo sprite of a woman, Kathleen Quigley.