Simona Pavoni

When I arrived at Milford House I was immediately fascinated by the decay and preciousness of its many rooms. Milford House had been slowly deteriorating for at least 10 years before it was purchased in 2020 Windows were broken and the roof was leaking. Live art Ireland  at Milford House is re-purposing the building and thus preserving  its layers of history.

In my residency experience I explored the building from head to toe and its surrounding land, following all the works in progress. Giving new life to a body, in many parts inhospitable, seemed to me to be a real work of art. Each room has many particularities, in its being uninhabited and on its way to being rehabilitated. The house has been modified by time: it has been subjected to settling; some walls have cracked to breathe; in some parts the ceiling has buckled under the weight of puddles of water on the upper floor. In its current form, the house shows a history that is not only historical but also temporal. The rooms are alive and in each of them something, even extremely small and not necessarily human, brings life to them.

In this room a large number of flies fly insistently towards the ceiling and the windows. In addition to a short film, I have also made drawings with the idea of being able to capture a room in all its details in a single glance; I want to evoke the precision of the anatomical drawing and, in the meantime, to underline what brings the anatomy of the house to life.

All the walls of the central flight of stairs are accompanied by a frame of neoclassical stucco cornice that extend all the way to the last studio-room. Made in the past (1750-80) possibly by some Italian craftsmen, the stucco cornice is now in a state of incompletion. Climbing the stairs I had the impression of entering a large mouth that has lost its milk teeth. This mouth or flight of stairs brings one to all the artists studios and therefore ideally opens up ones lead into art. Starting from this intuition, I decided to cast the stucco cornice and replace the missing ones by changing their colour from white to straw yellow.

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