Harriet Olsen - founder of Eiderdown Books - reveals the origin of Eiderdown Books
and the artistic legacy in Sussex (UK) where the company is based.
The idea for Eiderdown Books started over a bottle of wine at the kitchen table of our Sussex home a little over two years ago. I had worked in museums and galleries for more than a decade and produced numerous books about a multitude of artists who were working in the first half of the twentieth century. But I could count on one hand the number of books I’d made about female artists over those years. Within a few months, this bubble of an idea - to make books only about female artists and thereby ‘balance the bookshelves’ - had grown legs and arms and wings, and finally started to turn into a ‘real’ business once we had given it a name.
I’m frequently asked why we are called Eiderdown Books but it came from a very simple idea: eiderdowns are quilts which traditionally take the breast feathers of female eider ducks, extracted from their nests in the wild and stuffed into a material casing to end up in a bedroom. If we were going to be a publisher foregrounding women artists - who throughout history have been overlooked, ignored and often relegated to domestic interior spaces like the bedroom - then the eiderdown was a neat metaphor for this endeavour.
I wanted to produce books that were pick-up-able. No intimidating coffee table books for us! I’m much more interested in the kind of friendly, ‘Ladybird’ book we are all familiar with from childhood. So our books all have lots of large, full page images with an accompanying text which is understandable and accessible, even if you’ve never heard of this particular artist before.
When it came to deciding which artists to include in our collectable series called ‘Modern Women Artists’, Lee Miller was an absolute must; I had too often read about her only through the lens of the men in her life: her relationships, affairs and marriages. I wanted to foreground her as an artist in her own right, not just a model and muse but as a world-class photographer who took extraordinary images of key moments in the early twentieth century.
Miller’s involvement with the Surrealists is how she came to live in East Sussex in 1949. Sussex offered her a sanctuary from the horrors of war she had witnessed and documented in her photographs. Her home at ‘Farley’s’ is a treasure trove of artworks from artist friends who visited Miller and her husband the surrealist artist Roland Penrose. Above the kitchen aga is a tile painted and given to the couple by Picasso, in the dining room, living room and throughout the house hang works by a roster of artists including Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning.
Amongst this incredible private collection - which is open to the public for a few months every year - is an important work by the British artist Eileen Agar called ‘Quadriga’. I’m delighted that we will be including this work in the next book in our Modern Women Artists series about Eileen Agar to be published in February 2021.
Sussex is a hotbed of brilliant female artistic talent - from Lee Miller at Farleys, to Vanessa Bell at Charleston and Peggy Angus at Furlongs. I’m delighted Eiderdown Books - as a female founded independent business celebrating many of these women - can add to that Sussex artistic heritage.
Farley Farm, the home of Lee Miller is open until the end of October 2020 and tickets to pre-book are available to purchase online here. The book 'Lee Miller' published by Eiderdown Books is available (with free UK delivery) here.
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