The Friday Fillip

When I was a kid I used to make models of airplanes. I could spend hours gluing together oddly-shaped bits of grey plastic, anticipating the beautiful flying machine that would emerge from all this bricolage. (I now know that a portion of the charm may well have been the appealing… odour of the glue fumes.) Then I progressed to model train layouts, and built miniature suspension bridges and other nifty stuff. And now I don’t make models of anything, but instead have to contend with life-size (or 1:1, as it’s known in the craft world) objects that are considerably less biddable — and typically come “glue not included.”

Some of us, though, are wise enough to continue on with model building. Lori Nix is one such. She’s a photographer whose work got a recent mention in the New Yorker, which is where I came across her. Nix has built a small town of sorts, or, rather, a number of dioramas of rooms for a town devoid of people but partly occupied by nature. It can take her a year to construct a room, which she then photographs. Her pictures have an eerie feel to them and at the same time astonish, because of their incredible detail.

Here, for example, is her “library”:

click on image to enlarge

There’s a slide show on her site that offers you 15 glimpses of her creations. (Click on an image to advance to the next — and notice the racoon in the Clock Tower.) And for a two-minute video tour of her Map Room, have a look at this film.

And then, when your curiosity is aroused, you can watch this short video on YouTube, in which Nix explains some of her motivations and her techniques to the interviewer, while you get a behind-the-scenes view of her small world.