Read Online Circus by Claire Battershill - Free Book Online Page A

ever knelt on the floor with Jemima and made knowing eye contact with her, as if she too were grown up. Her parents, for instance, preferred the safe distance of the sofa, where they existed slightly above Jemima, in a private world of anxious murmurs about fish and finance. In fact, Jemima imagined growing up as a process of ascending – floating up from the carpet to the couch.
    When the dollhouse was assembled, Barnaby praised it lavishly. He lifted Jemima’s arms up in victory as if she’d won a wrestling match, and she felt, for the first time, like she’d accomplished more than she’d set out to do. Unfortunately, Barnaby was unable to assist Jemima with any more of her projects, since he left as abruptly as he arrived, a matter of days after he first appeared at their door. He departed in such a rush that he left behind a trail of stray objects: a book of the seven wonders of the ancient world, into which he had pasted photographs and written notes from his own travels, a flask half full of pungent liquor, and a single, size twelve, black-and-white wingtip shoe. As you’ll see upstairs, the seven wonders book provided the inspiration for at least, well, seven of the dioramas we exhibit. Barnaby’s dollhouse will be the last item we’ll see on this floor before we head upstairs. It’s displayed alongside the book, the flask, and the shoe.
    Even with this earliest model, Jemima went beyond the kit’s instructions. The parts provided were delightful, but after Barnaby’s departure she couldn’t help but feel that there was more work to do. She added to the house gradually over the following three years, constructing a bathtub, for instance, outof an old sardine can and papering the walls in layers of bright candy wrappers. She painted expressive faces on the dolls and clothed them in printed dresses and tailored suits made out of scraps from her mother’s sewing basket. In her early teenage years, Jemima began to add extensions to the house, including a cellophane greenhouse containing a single bird of paradise fashioned in origami from a postage stamp.
    Needless to say, Jemima’s juvenilia were steps towards a more refined version of her craft. After Barnaby’s dollhouse came miniatures of each of the seven wonders in succession. At first she relied on mail-order catalogues for pre-made dolls and tiny rolltop desks and stove-top kettles. These she combined with more inventive furnishings of her own construction made from seashells, beach glass, and elastic bands.
    You’ll notice as we work our way through the exhibits that over her career as a miniaturist, Jemima’s creations became smaller and smaller. By 1988 she was working with a laboratory-quality microscope and using implements designed for the dissection of insect wings. The smallest artifacts you’ll see in the museum are in this display to our right, which has been set up with microscopes so that you can appreciate the intricacy of these late works. If you take a peek – yes, don’t be shy! Have a good look! – you’ll see a lighthouse made out of a grain of rice. Then, next to it in the display case are four balsa-wood elephants and a plastic elephant trainer inside the eye of a needle. Finally, you have a summer cottage that’s no larger than a crystal of sea salt. By the time she was working at this minute scale, it took Jemima six months to produce one figurine. The cottage, for example, consists of 107 individual polymer claypieces, which are completely invisible to the naked eye. Legend has it that she spent a year and a half rendering the shell of an oyster, complete with a single pearl, only to have it vanish when she sneezed.
    I’d like us to pause by the second display here. Why don’t you find a spot with a good view? This magnificent house, which you’ll see is larger than most of the miniatures in the museum, has six rooms and measures exactly two feet tall from the tip of the roof to the foundations. In order to fully