Mirror, mirror on the wall...

Actually, in my case, it should read ‘Mirrors, mirrors on the walls, armoires, dressing table, buffet...’

The first mirror I can remember was my grandmother’s dressing table mirror. As a child my parents dragged me with to visit my grandparents in Campbell, at least once a year. Campbell is a tiny little town near Douglas in the Northern Cape...famous for the small Livingstone church by the river and its outrageous thunderstorms. I distinctly remember the beautiful mirror on the dressing table, with fine bevelled edges on which the candlelight created colourful distorted patterns. During the thunderstorms my grandmother used to cover all the mirrors in the house with sheets, including the one on the dressing table. Today that same dressing table with the bevelled mirror is in my bedroom in France...

I guess my love for mirrors stems from those times and whenever I visit an antique shop, a brocante (bric-a-brac) or a vide grenier (vide = empty; grenier = attic), I buy another mirror! They are like works of art, reflecting and framing images around them in a different way, constantly changing with the time of day and the time of year. Presently I have mirrors from all over...Italy, Spain, Zanzibar, Switzerland, France and of course South Africa – too many to cover during thunderstorms!

Added to my obsession with mirrors is my love for candles or bougies, candle holders, candelabra (sometimes called a ‘candle tree’ as it is a candle holder with multiple arms), wall sconces and chandeliers...also dating back to the Campbell visits, where there was no electricity in those days. Like the mirrors candles create intriguing patterns and a world of fantasy.

I once bought an old Venetian chandelier at a Christmas market in Venice to fund the children of Africa. Back home in South Africa, having smuggled it onto the plane as hand luggage, I turned it into a candle chandelier...that was during the time of load shedding! However, now it has been changed back to an electric chandelier to light the library/study of my house in France. And sometimes, looking at it, I feel like Sia to “swing from the chandelier”...