Sally Kindberg’s House of Dreams workshop at Swedenborg House

Where would you keep your magic numbers?  In your paper House of Dreams of course!

Just one of the many inventive drawings made on St Valentines Day this week during another workshop at Swedenborg House.  If you had a little wooden summer house in a quiet and safe location, preferably with a flower garden and a clear view of the sky, what would you use it for?

Eighteenth century polymath Emanuel Swedenborg‘s summer house was the inspiration for this event.

I’d first glimpsed Swedenborg‘s house when a very small child during a visit to Skansen in Sweden, where it still is today. My workshop houses are made of paper, ready to be filled with stories and images, then cut out and folded into spaces for dreams and transformations.

Houses were filled with balls of crochet wool and hooks, families, a penguin pizza restaurant, or customised with additional paper architectural features.  Swedenborg thought birds and fish represented ideas and facts, so I provided a few of those.  Some became weather vanes, or were house guests.

There’s currently an exhibition about Swedenborg’s summer house at Swedenborg House in Bloomsbury, London.