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THE ENTRANCE HALL
Stepping over the threshold, you are enveloped in warm amber light filtered through a pane of coloured glass and a fanlight in the front door. The visitor is transported into an Oriental
fantasy, richly fed by Helen’s passion for Edward Fitzgerald’s culturally influential translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.
The painted ceramic heads of two turbaned men welcome the visitor. These wall ornaments were produced by the Bossons Company, an English pottery firm. Their collection of
heads, representing different ethnicities, was hugely popular in the 1960s and 1970s, introducing characters that symbolised a life of freedom from the structures of the modern
world to the domestic sphere. The head on the left is Persian, a distinct nod to Khayyam, who was from Nishapur in Persia.
A Persian-style carpet hangs on one wall, flanked by a crescent-shaped mirror. Two more mirrors are positioned on either side of the door leading to the living room, a second
crescent moon and an outsized hand mirror, through which you observe yourself passing into Helen’s inner world.
At the door to the living room, you are met by a sinister doll acting as a doorstop and a bottle of canned fruit preserved by Helen herself. Leading from the entrance hall are three
doors — to the living room, dining room, and the bedroom known as the honeymoon room. The entrance hall was the first room Helen started with her project to transform her
parents’ home into a house of glass and light.
The house can be seen as a physical representation of her psyche, and the objects she filled it with informed and inspired the sculptures that populated her garden.
30 FOR THE LOVE OF LIGHT
FOR THE LOVE OF LIGHT 31