Through the Keyholes don’t come much more colourful than this. Chrissy Harris visits artist Lucie Smailes in her Ashburton flat
A rat doing the vacuuming, a basket of plastic flowers with lights, a giant ice cream…
‘When people first come inside they can’t even concentrate or talk,’ says Lucie Smailes. ‘There’s some more behind you, look.’
Birds in a glass dome, paperweights, push along elephant…I’m having trouble concentrating and talking.
Artist Lucie Smailes’ flat in the heart of Ashburton sure sticks it to the world of decluttering and clinical lines.
‘That’s not me at all,’ says Lucie, who is certainly not into neutral tones. ‘I can understand it in one sense because there’s this whole thing about the more crap you have around you, the more chaotic your brain. But I just know what I like.’
Lucie has known what she likes from the age of about 15 when she bought a 1950s record holder because she liked the colours and the graphics.
It kickstarted a lifetime of collecting and creating. Lucie spends much of her free time visiting car boot sales, flea markets, antique fairs, etc across the country on her never-ending quest for life’s objects.
Sometimes she stores them, sometimes she makes incredible handcrafted sculptures out of them. Her eclectic, dreamlike pieces have a loyal fan base, being added to all of the time by people who are intrigued by the surreal style and colour of these one-off designs.
Lucie recently worked with shop and business owners in Totnes to create stunning visual displays in the windows up and down the streets.
‘My sketches are with objects,’ she says, adding that she sometimes finds herself moving things around and pulling things together while she’s drinking her morning cup of coffee in the flat she’s lived in for two years. ‘I’m doing it all the time. That’s how I roll. I’m kind of used to that now.’
Lucie, who has a degree and a masters’ degree in fine art, ran a series of vintage shops in Bristol before moving to Devon. She fell in love with the countryside and the beaches and the peace and quiet. After living in a rural village for a few years, she decided to look for a place in Ashburton.
‘I used to come to this building for a Buddhist meeting and then I found out that one of the women was moving out,’ says Lucie. ‘When I first came to see it, I was like, oh my god, I’ve got to have this flat.
‘When I saw the upstairs, I knew it would be so perfect for a studio. Everywhere I’d been before, I’ve just had these little old container sheds or something that leaked. It was this common denominator. All my stuff was getting ruined.’
This flat was ideal and so was Ashburton, a town renowned for its culture, craft and high concentration of shops selling antiques and collectables. It suited Lucie immediately.
‘When I moved in, everyone was really amazed because within a week, I had everything set out exactly how I wanted it,’ she says, as we make our way past the ‘shelf of loveliness’ in the kitchen and then into the living room (child mannequin walking a porcelain Yorkshire terrier, shelf of shadow boxes, more birds…my notebook is going to read back like a mystical memory game).
‘The whole of this floor is laid out just how I want it,’ says Lucie, who often changes the outfits on the mannequins or order of things on the shelves, depending on how she feels.
‘It’s all about the groups, I pull towards something like a magnet.’
The 1950s colour palette in here is fabulous, all those pinks and yellows and turquoise – there’s no room for shades of grey.
‘I’ve always been drawn to the graphics and colours, the shapes,’ says Lucie. ‘I like that sense of fun.’
She finds many of her finds online these days but still does some of her best collecting the good old-fashioned way.
‘When I go to a car boot, I get really inspired by how people put groups of things together on their table to sell,’ she says. ‘The whole experience for me is my inspiration for making art. It’s all about the groups of objects, the stories, the characters who are selling it and anything that might happen while I’m there.
‘When I first started collecting, there wasn’t any eBay or Instagram or Facebook, nothing. It was literally a case of getting out there and looking for stuff. Everything is so accessible now,’ she adds, explaining that she recently got back into collecting 1950s swimming costumes. ‘It’s all at your fingertips now, which is kind of…well… I don’t really like that.’
Having a global market to tap into has helped in some ways, especially when it comes to finding things like Australian 1950s kitchen cannisters.
Sometimes, however, the best finds are much closer to home. Lucie is showing me a lovely looking glass cabinet full of bright vintage clothing (her outfits are also works of art). The cabinet had been left outside a hotel in Paignton. It took months to dry out before Lucie took it apart and completely restored it.
‘I love doing stuff like that. It was abandoned and fit for nothing and now it’s come back to life.’
We head up to Lucie’s studio and it’s time for the lists in my notebook to take on a new level of randomness.
A stuffed fox in a pram, a lady with an antler sticking out of her head with a bird hanging off it, a chandelier made from old handheld mirrors…
And that’s just the things you can see. In all of the drawers and on all of the shelves are carefully collected items, from toy cowboy figures to vintage radios, badges and more. One drawer is full of yellow buttons.
Despite the sheer volume of things in here, it doesn’t feel chaotic. Everything has its place somehow and the overall feeling is one of… joy. Stuff really can do that to you.
‘I think it comes down to different sides of the brain,’ says Lucie. ‘Some people get really into it and others just aren’t like that. How I am, how I dress, how I live, the art I make. It’s almost like it all merges in. It’s entertaining for everyone – that’s what I realised about my art and my house and what I give to people. It’s entertaining.’
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