Graduated in Interior Architecture and Design from London Metropolitan University in 2000.Wide-ranging experience in Museum and Archive design, operatic stage design and Architectural Memorialisation. Produced a number of award-winning oral history film documentaries on Memory and Landscape and co-edited a series of books on the the Philosophy and Politics of Urban Architecture (Random House 1996). Has worked at KIRK + Interiors as Senior Research Analyst and Business Manager, developing restaurant and hotel interiors, reflecting her personal interest in ambient eating and reflective design. Currently living in North London with her young son, her favourite buildings include the M-Hotel (www.m-house.org) and The White City (http://www.white-city.co.il/)
Current Obsessions:
The yurt visitor does not knock on the door: she is always welcome; the yurt visitor does not step on the threshold: to do that is to tread on the neck of the host; and the yurt visitor asks four questions-to which the answer is always 'yes'. I fell in love and became obsessed with yurts on my fiftieth birthday this year. Always drawn to tents, discovering yurts was a moment of pure recognition.
Descended from generations often in flight, two of my biggest interests - land and nomadic structures - finally found co-existence and clarity. I believe my yurt to be the nearest yurt in the world to an underground transport system. I wake to the sound of squirrels curiously eyeing the smoke curling from the wood stove chimney, glance at the ancient oak tree through the foor foot perspex roof dome and in twenty five minutes stand in Leicester Square.
Yurts are one of the oldest housing structures in the world: the shape echoes the silhouette of the ancient mound at Silbury, the domes of sacred temples, the ice houses of the Arctic north. Yurts stay upright in storms, yet can be moved to the courtyard of Eden Grove in an hour. They can be seductive bedroom, meeting place, thinking place and eating space. My yurt can transform itself into an ancient dining hall, or a modern restaurant. We can serve a family, wine a board meeting and dine a pair of illict lovers. For each, we can transform the decor as a magician by sleight of hand. And in the morning, the yurt can disappear, so the courtyard can re-function as car park, or garden or simply the entrance to our office. (KK)
Josef Koudelka's photograph 'Prague, 1968, 22 August, past midday' shown at the V and A's Cold War Modern exhibition is a powerful and compelling statement, communicating many layers of meaning. The Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968 was a brutal display of Soviet power, dictatorship and violence. Five months earlier the Czech nation had voted and achieved democracy, and in the heady days of the so-called 'Prague Spring', political freedom and social equality was briefly glimpsed by this cultured, dumpling-loving nation. But it was too much for the brutal Russian regime, who feared loss of power in her satellite countries. Troops invaded on the night of the 21st August and as planes flew overhead, the nation was terrified yet again; many had lived through Nazi invasion and brutality thirty years earlier.
I know this because my family were trapped in Prague, a few metres from Wenceslas Square (the equivalent of Prague's Trafalgar Square), the street depicted in Koudelka's picture. It is one of my clearest childhood memories. The Russians broadcast that any individual or groups of people demonstrating in the streets, would be shot. On 22 August, the Czech people, by word of mouth, told each other that their protest must be through absence, not presence.
Thus, Koudelka's photograph shows the silent, absent demonstration of a nation - no-one walked or drove on the usually crowded streets that afternoon. Instead there was an eerie emptiness and only the sound of tanks rolling on the cobblestones. Even the largest country in the world was powerless to stop such a 'non'-protest.Of course, twenty years later, as the Soviet Union collapsed and each Eastern European country threw off Soviet dominance, the Czech Velvet Revolution seamlessly achieved what it had tried to do two decades too early. My father's family, trapped throughout their lives by different regimes, once again watched history unfurl outside their bedroom window. In December 1999 I organised a fund-raising evening of drama, music and discussion on behalf of Amnesty International entitled 'Last Days of the Century'. Koudelka kindly allowed me to use this photograph for publicity, as well as the main image on our programme. He visited me from Paris and gave me a copy of this picture. As the bloody twentieth-century staggered towards its end, this photograph was my way of connecting both my family history to the larger history we have all lived through, as well as paying homage to a brave nation standing up to the main power behind the Cold War. (Katherine Klinger)
A Photographer's Life 1990-2005
Susan at the House on Hedges Lane, From Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005
The current exhibition by Annie Leibovitz at the National Portrait Gallery, shows the work of one of the finest photographers alive today. Her ability to capture the life and soul of individuals is beautifully shown at the exhibition; in particular, her series of photographs depicting the birth of her children and the death of her life-partner, Susan Sontag, herself an iconic and brilliant 20th century figure.
