The art of miniature

I've been fangirling over artist Lori Nix for a number of years (in fact I'm very tempted to say "since we exhibited together at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York", even though she was in the actual exhibition and I was in the online gallery add-on, Small Realities. So not really in the same league at all, even though I made it onto the Small Realities front page).

I bought the book that goes with the exhibition back in 2011 (the year the exhibition happened) but have been after a copy of Lori Nix's book The City ever since.

Alas it went out of print very quickly and the second-hand market soon had it into the hundreds of dollars (possibly due to a fairly constant flow of media attention), and thus well beyond my budget.

I'd pretty much resigned myself to never having a copy of the book, but still occasionally checked out Booko to see how stupidly expensive it was.

And then, one day in April this year, something amazing happened: I found a copy for under $100! And in Sydney, no less!

I snapped it up as an early birthday present, fully expecting to get the 'Oh sorry, it's not actually in stock' email, but instead getting the 'We just shipped it to you' email. I was gobsmacked at my luck.

(Of course, nothing birthday present-related will beat the buying of my first home, settlement of which just happened to land on the day before my birthday this year).

As part of the preparation for my shift, I realised there were some things in my life (and my home) that I could no longer justify.

Sadly, one of these was bette Noir, which had sat in my front hall for almost two and a half years before heading to its new home.

I was feeling bad about my lack of action during that time until I was reminded that it was destined for the tip before it came to me: so perhaps I was only ever supposed to be its caretaker, not its owner.

And when I discovered that its new owner (caretaker) was in the studio next to one of its creators, I was happy.