Horror Vacui

The weirdest thing about our new Chicago condo is that the two bathrooms are almost exactly the same. The only difference is that the one off the bedroom has a closet and is a little bigger. Otherwise they were exactly the same – same green tiles on the floor, same glass door tub enclosure and the same white tiles with a green diamond border, same small white sink cabinet, same green counter top, same large medicine chest, same “Hollywood make up lights”, and the same porcelain toilet paper holders, hooks, and towel bars (both of which had obviously fallen down at least once and broken a bit since they were hung too close to the toilet and people couldn’t help using them as if they were handicap bars).

The green worked well as a mermaid bathroom but wouldn’t work as the base for a sun bathroom so while most of the mermaids went to the bedroom bathroom, a few ended up in the living room bathroom. “It’s kind of “Mermaid Lite” in here,” my sister commented.

I really didn’t want the two bathrooms to be exactly the same, though so I was glad when the wall with the medicine chest had to come down for some plumbing work. I mean, who needs a medicine chest in their guest bathroom anyway? We hung the mirror from our old guest bathroom which is primarily blue and green above the sink and decided that this bathroom’s colors would be blue and green. I was pleased that the diamond tiles of the mirror went nicely with the diamond tiles in the shower. And I ordered some knobs for the cabinet that were blue and green and kind of a diamond shape. Then I looked at those empty walls! I thought of the pottery bird picture that had hung in our kitchen but had no place here in Chicago. I also placed a small glass box with a bird on the top on the glass shelf we had hung under the mirror. Then I put a new cast iron feather I purchased at a sidewalk sale this summer on top of the toilet.

I then announced that three bird things were enough and that this wasn’t going to become a bird bathroom – that there was no need for the walls to be filled with birds. But that one bird hanging on one side of the door did look kind of lonely so when we went to an arts festival and saw another similar sized bird of course we bought him for the other wall. But we don’t need to fill all these walls with birds, I told myself again.

In his essay on his show “Chicago We Own It” at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art”, William Swislow writes that “Horror Vacui” a term that means fear of empty spaces is a defining characteristic of many Chicago collectors. Aha! Now I just need to know the word for what makes me want to put all the bird things together. For even after declaring “no more birds in the bathroom”, I remembered that my sister had given me a green and blue plate with a bird image which obviously belongs with the others.