W
hile I was drawing this, I looked up to see a woman wearing a yoga costume standing off to my left, smiling and staring at me and my iPad.
I took off my headphones and said hello.
‘I just wondered what was going on here,’ said the woman. ‘I live just behind you and I was doing yoga in the living room when I saw you sitting out here and became intrigued.’
I told the woman about the hundred houses project and the stories, and that she would be this drawing’s story.
The woman let out a small shriek.
‘Maybe you could draw my house next!’ the woman said to me.
‘Maybe,’ I told the woman. ‘It all depends when I am back this way, and whether the light is right, and so on.’
‘Is this your job? Is this how you make a living?’ the woman asked.
I told the woman no, but that I did go to art school so I like to keep my hand in, and I have been at this project for years, and that I am trying to get it finished this summer.
‘I get it,’ she said. ‘I’m a hairdresser, but I would love to do yoga full time. I’ve been practicing yoga for more than 7 years, and people keep asking me if I want to learn to teach yoga. But in all honesty, I feel my place is to just encourage others, to just lead by example.’
‘That’s a lovely outlook,’ I said.
‘I used to be in the Army,’ she then told me. ‘I used to build bombs. I know how to fire weapons and build bombs.’
‘Shit a brick!’ I said. ‘You know how to build bombs?’
‘Yes,’ the woman told me, smiling down at me. ‘I was the only woman trained to do it and I can build them by hand.’
I didn’t really know what to say to that, never having met someone who knew how to build bombs, so I just listened with my mouth hanging open while she went on to tell me about the assemblage of what, to all intents and purposes, were handcrafted weapons of mass destruction.
A Hundred Houses 