Pantovola Ghostly Homes and Haunted Teapot

We’ve long been fans of the art of Pantovola, which is wildly varied: She’s a textile artist, doll maker, and painter, sometimes all at once, but always a strange, mesmerizing mix of delicate, haunting, and unbelievably lovely. For this issue, we focused on her art that features cottages—sweet little homes with spirits emerging from the chimney stacks and ghosts escaping from the teapots and transparent wolves flying past the windows … We asked her about these visions in a recent conversation.

Enchanted Living: Can you tell us a little bit about you? Where do you live and work? What fascinates you and inspires you?

Anouk Pantovola: My name is Anouk Pantovola, and I’m a visual artist working under the name Pantovola. I’ve lived and worked in many places in Europe, currently in Barcelona. Creating is what defines me and is really essential to how I experience life and the world around me. I have always, since I could hold a pencil, made worlds to live in with drawing, painting, puppetry, and miniature theater. The imaginary, the magical—this is what I always search for in everyday life through making art. I have a special love for the theater, especially puppetry theater. The animated object, the puppet that comes alive through our imagination, is what moves me.

EL: Can you tell us about the ghostly figures that inhabit your work? We love them!

AP: The ghostly figures come from my love for the ethereal, the otherworldly realm, that which the eye cannot quite see, the dusky place where creatures live that we cannot quite know or understand. Graveyards are places I always love to visit— the older, the more abandoned, the better. The way nature takes over our manmade structures, the silence, the stillness of these small worlds, gives me a deep sense of peace and almost of belonging.

As a child I created shadow theaters with cutout figures behind Japanese paper—witches, animals, trees. I was moved by the figurines that appeared only in the dark as silhouettes against the flickering flame of the candle. Later on, the ghost became a beloved theme in my work: not quite here, not quite there; half in this world, half in the next.

The Chimney Ghost was my first ghostly sculpture, where the ghost appeared as a smoke-like figure rising from the chimney of a cottage. A little later on, these ghosts started to inhabit teapots.

EL: This issue is about cottage witchcraft, and we’re showcasing some of your images that center around home and nature. How does this theme resonate with you?

AP: This idea of “home” is something that really fascinates me from a personal perspective, in the sense that I’ve always tried to feel “at home” in this world.

I’m deeply nostalgic and sometimes it seemed to me that I was always chasing a memory or a trace of a sense of “home.” I’ve tried to capture that feeling with rituals, by scent, by sound. They’ve always been attempts to grasp something more complex that I didn’t quite understand until recently. The only place I do always feel completely at home is in nature. This is for the obvious reason that nature is our natural home, the home we’ve abandoned and traded for manmade structures.

EL: And how do you stay enchanted in your everyday life?

AP: Creating magical objects with everyday objects like teapots makes me look at the world around me in a more enchanted way. Now when I’m in the city and see a teapot somewhere in a shop, I cannot help but imagine … But also by looking at the way nature grows and evolves, in the big and the small. Paying attention to the small creatures living their lives around us. Or the way the late-evening sun hits the surface of the water in the pond. Finding the hidden entrances in the trunk of the old tree in the park, knowing that is where they live, of course! Because faeries live in our imaginations, and that in itself makes them real, because the imagination is as real as the door in the house is real.

See more of Pantovola’s art at pantovola.com or on Instagram @pantovola.art.