Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic I’ve mistimed my journey to Wivenhoe, Essex, and when I arrive early to meet the artists Guy Taplin, his wife Robina Jack and their daughter Nancy Rose Taplin, there is no answer at the door of their maritime cottage. But I am being watched. From a tiny window in the corrugated iron extension, a pale woman stares at me. It’s a mannequin. Robina and Nancy soon arrive, two terriers in tow, to let me in. It’s a deceptively large house, jigsaw-like, with small rooms running into more small rooms as it extends away from the street. Nancy’s house backs on to it, with the boundary removed so their gardens are merged. Immediately it’s clear that the mannequin was just a glimpse of what’s inside: a palimpsest of 44 years of collecting — mostly by Guy — curated with mischievous humour. It’s tricky to even get inside, because a Syrian mosaic of a horse from the late Roman era (supposedly — “apparently they faked these,” says Guy) is leaning against the wall of the narrow hallway. “I swapped it for 20 penguins,” he says. Born in 1939 in east London, Guy creates sculptures of birds inspired by local coastal species, carved mostly from driftwood and other found timber. His work has been shown at the Tate, the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hambourg and Washington State University. The late sculptor Dame Elisabeth Frink was a particular admirer of his style and owned a number of pieces. Robina creates ceramics featuring colourful menageries. She’s a favourite of interior designer Kit Kemp — who has created a wallpaper featuring her work — and her plates and platters are on display at projects including Ham Yard Hotel. Nancy is a printmaker and painter, working with found materials. Like their interlinked home life, all three are represented by the London St James’s gallery Messum’s; Nancy is currently in a group show, and a solo show by Guy opens next month. I’m led past the little sitting room at the front of the house. It has a low-lit, Victorian feel, with chintz wallpaper and green panelling. Every space is full of maritime antiques — stuffed birds, model ships, the bill of a sawfish painted with a landscape. Behind the armchair, low to the ground, are huge punt guns once mounted to boats and used to kill waterfowl.The sun streams in through the kitchen’s large window, illuminating the pale blue walls. There’s a niche full of family photos; the units came from Robina’s grandmother, and date to 1875. “I like primitive things,” says Guy; he wouldn’t want a new kitchen. An antique narwhal tusk (“They’re not quite illegal, not yet”) is strung up above a door that hides the narrow staircase. All around are more curios. Beyond a bulky weather-worn figurehead from a ship, carved boats — traditional votive objects hung in churches in Cornwall and Brittany — dangle from the low ceiling in the dining area. What appears to be a handmade ceramic cat litter scoop is flanked by golden sconces. Anybody using the toilet must contemplate a child-sized carving of Christ on the cross. A handle next to steps into a bedroom is fashioned from a painted oar. Outside, one of the many sheds is guarded by fibreglass caryatids. Last are the birds — stuffed, carved, painted — everywhere. Around 150 are wooden decoys, mostly late-19th century — from Maine, Prince Edward Island and California, among other places across North America — mingling with Guy’s own pieces. “I’ve got a certain obsessive nature,” he says.The family’s work is united by avian motifs. Guy and Robina met while they were working in Regent’s Park in the 1970s: Robina was a gardener, Guy was a “bird man”, looking after the birds on the lake. He first encountered the wooden decoys that prompted his career at an antiques market at nearby Camden Lock. His studio adjoins the house, full of incomplete sculptures jumbled with mannequins and other oddities. He pulls out a dusty plastic shopping bag when I manage to clamber up the steep, sawdust-strewn stairs, and shows me a replica Colt Walker pistol. He did national service for two years in Cyprus, 1958-60, he tells me. “That was really horrible,” he says. “And then they stopped national service. He was one of the last,” adds Robina. “He’s probably why they stopped it,” says Nancy.Robina creates her brightly patterned painted pieces in the garden sheds, where she has a small kiln. She used to make stained glass: her work is embedded throughout the home; the front door is topped with a glass depiction of Maggie, the old family dog. Nancy works in the attic of her house, a calm and cosy space with pale walls that she shares with her five-year-old daughter. Antiques and pictures here are curated with comparative restraint; the kitchen tiles were made by Robina. Her desk overlooks her parents’ garden and their studios. “You check on our work!” says Robina. The birds live this transitory life. They don’t have any emotional baggage, which we carry heavilyThey’re entertaining company, full of camaraderie, their lives like the intersecting parts of the house — distinct but connected. One of the dogs, Nora, is Nancy’s but the households are so intermingled that you wouldn’t know which belongs to who. When Nancy moved in with her then two-year-old daughter in 2021, to the home where her grandfather had lived after the death of his wife, it upended her parents’ lives. “We basically wrought complete mayhem,” she says. “She’s quite a force,” adds Robina. But today they’ve settled into a rhythm, eating, shopping, walking the dogs and doing the school run together. She had grown up in Wivenhoe, and missed it. “I would sit and meditate; I’d walk the whole river in my mind.” Today, while they drop in to see each other throughout the day, their work places are kept separate. Despite this, says Nancy, “there’s quite a lot of conversation between Dad’s and my work . . . We’re in a rhythm, working together.” She believes the themes in their work have converged — and they’ve become so much closer to each other.“I never think of myself as an artist. I just, you know, make these wooden birds,” says Guy. “Everything was coincidental,” he adds, of his success. “There was no rationale behind it.” Visitors to Regent’s Park first convinced him to part with his decoy-inspired sculptures; soon he was selling the aged-looking birds into the antiques trade. He was taken up by a gallery, “by accident”, he says; it put on a solo show and sold everything. “I come from a working-class background so I had no experience of that world at all”. Now his pieces can be found in the Royal Collection and the homes of actor and author Michael Palin and the Guinness family.The move to Wivenhoe was, again, “coincidental”, says Guy. Property just happened to be cheap. He initially moved here with friends, but shortly after marrying Robina in 1979 they bought their current home. It was £11,000; “he couldn’t believe his luck,” she says. Located on the River Colne before it widens into an estuary, the town was the last place that boats could squeeze into before the river reaches Colchester, and was built on the industries of shipbuilding and fishing. It’s “full of energy, it attracts all oddballs and all the rest of it”, says Guy — Francis Bacon was a neighbour when they arrived. It was, he says “a refuge for a lot of people”. Unoccupied for seven years and last redecorated before the war, the house had “no basins. There was a pump. But the pump wasn’t connected to anything,” says Robina. It even had gas lamps. “Nothing had been touched,” says Guy. “It was wonderful.” Today, little has changed in terms of structure beyond a modest extension. The wood panelling throughout is original. Nancy was a baby at the time. So what was it like growing up in Wivenhoe? The last shipyard closed in the early 1980s so, along with the woods and river, “there were these enormous industrial wastelands that were really fun to play in”, says Nancy. “Deeply dangerous,” adds Robina. Nancy and her brother Sam used to spend a lot of time in their father’s studio on the beach, sleeping on rickety metal bunk beds and hearing curlews calling in the evening. She recalls coming in “head-to-toe in mud. We’d just roll in it.”She tries to remind herself of these memories when raising her daughter, who is “notorious for lying down in puddles”, she says. “I think we’ve sanitised our lives so much.”Her brother Sam was a sculptor, carving fish and birds. He died in 2012 and his work hangs throughout the house. “Sam’s death tied us,” says Guy. “That was part of the journey. It’s never a straight road.”Nancy claims to have become “an artist by mistake. I spent most of my life trying not to be an artist. It got me in the end.” After abandoning her PhD in art history at the Courtauld, her family, without her knowledge, signed her up to be included in a group show of their work. That was 2010.“I always thought I’d be a potter,” says Robina, conversely. But it was only 15 years ago that she rediscovered the medium. “In the end you get there.”While the birds in Robina and Nancy’s work are from all over the world, Guy depicts shore birds. “They live this, to us, transitory life,” he says. “They don’t have any emotional baggage, which we carry heavily”. The home is both inspiration for, and encapsulation of this intergenerational shared taste. “It’s an enormous resting place for so many objects that are just perfect in their own way, and often that’s very imperfect,” says Nancy. It’s their “tarnish and patina” that resonates, says Guy. “They reflect your unconscious.” “Modern Romantics” (featuring Nancy Rose Taplin), until January 31; “Guy Taplin 2025”, February 5-28, both at David Messum Fine Art, London; messums.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
