Olly Wall Lamp

Olly is in her bed having breakfast. She likes drinking coffee in a Wedgwood Bone China cup with gold contours: the luxury of habits. Today she would like to write using a classic typewriter such as those that Marcello Nizzoli designed for Olivetti, but avoiding the neurotic coming and going of words, which can be immediately deleted if you don’t like them. She just presses the keys with more concentration and she listen to the sound of each letter. But she has to go out shortly, so she gets ready quickly, showing that she is at ease with this accelerated pace, the hat being the last gesture of her dance. A black cab drives her to the East End, in the Dalston neighbourhood, in Ridley Road. Here there is a market where the arrangements of fruit and vegetable boxes in precarious balance coexist with objects: a scenery of shameless colours similar to those of the precious wax fabrics, made of printed cotton, which is the background to the sobriety of Olly’s colours. She finds a pair of tiny glass lamps, which are lovely and graceful as all tiny things are: they look like her a little bit, because they can stay everywhere and they adorn every place where they stay.