Ken Munsie: Postcard from B

I am so delighted to have won the Most Outstanding Work of the Immanuel Arts Festival 2022 in Buderim Sunshine Coast Australia ...

Postcard from B is all about music, time and a broken tryst ...

Starting with a rescued wooden violin case a friend gave me some time past - I have mounted the case on a platform to give it stability and set the platform on four rusty iron wheels - giving the piece a sense of travel - and then inside the case - well, I'll let you explore the story ...

The violin case is very old and quite beautiful and to keep a sense of its age and its history, I have not spent too much energy nor material patching-up the wear and tear of time ... it would be wonderful to know to whom it originally belonged and what beautiful music was played on the violin it protected ...

Scrolls made from aged piano sheet music from the turn of the century add stability and meaning ...

Open the case cover and an intricate story unfolds within ...

Staring at the bottom are many scrolls containing the music and the words from a bygone time ...

... then next is the workings of a clock from New York and dated 1882 -

the year our story begins ...

wind the spring up and the mechanism ticks the hours away ...

... next is our heroine ...

The centre ( central ) piece is a late 1800s postcard featuring a photo of Maud Jeffries ... I found this very personal discarded postcard at a Collectables Fair some time ago ...

Maud Evelyn Craven Jeffries (14 December 1869 – 26 September 1946) was an American actress. A popular subject for a wide range of theatrical post-cards and studio photographs, she was noted for her height, voice, presence, graceful figure, attractive features, expressive eyes, and beautiful face.

An audience favourite wherever she went, Jeffries' performances over a decade in New York, London, Australia, and New Zealand met wide critical acclaim; especially in the role of Desdemona in Shakespeare's Othello and, in particular, for her creation of the role of Mercia in Wilson Barrett's masterpiece The Sign of the Cross. On viewing Jeffries' performance (when just 20) as Almida in Claudian, one critic observed:

…” in Maud Jeffries we have an almost ideal Almida. It is emphatically a part for a young girl, and Miss Jeffries made it throb with life and genius. So youthful an actress so capable of feeling, not merely interpreting emotion, ought to and will have a future before her “…

Maud married a wealthy Australian grazier, Boer war veteran, and former aide-de-camp to New Zealand's Governor-General, James Bunbury Nott Osborne (1878-1934). Osborne was so enamoured of Jeffries that he joined her theatrical company in late 1903 in order to press his suit. Engaged in May 1904, they married in October 1904, and had two children together (one of whom died as an infant). Jeffries left the stage in 1906, and continued to live a quiet, very happy life, devoted to her family and her beautifully designed gardens, on their family property, "Bowylie", at Gundaroo, NSW, until her death, at 76 years, of cancer.