Earlier this month I was going through some artwork that I had in storage. Oh, my.
First: Now that we’re in Poland, we live in a house; in Amsterdam, we lived in an apartment…an apartment with exactly one closet, so storage space was virtually non-existent. The apartment had a room in the back garden that most people use to store bicycles and stuff like that. I used it to store art supplies which was, in hindsight, a very very very bad idea.
The room was concrete and had sealed doors but was not insulated. It’s a bike shed, after all! And although I had things wrapped and stored in sealed boxes, I discovered this week that many pieces of art and other items were…moldy.
I make stuff with paper, after all. And the Netherlands is a pretty damp place.
It was one of those head-smack moment where you don’t know whether to be furious with yourself, or just sad. After sorting through two boxes of collages, I ended up tossing most of it. And then I was both furious with myself, and sad.
So what did I do? Shake off the little (okay, loud) voice that told me how foolish I’d been to store paper artwork in a bicycle shed in the Netherlands, and make more. Indoors.
A hard-learned lesson, but one that leads me to wonder about other places we store or display art: Storing in a garage, for example, or hanging pictures in a kitchen or bathroom where there’s a lot of steam? Hmmm…
A happy—mold-free—Monday to you!
