We’re all faking it in one way or another…

‘A series of lucky accidents meant that around my birthday I was in Paris, and stumbled upon an exhibition by Sophie Calle’: Eva Wiseman. Photograph: Ed Alcock/The Observer

We had a fireplace that had always bothered me. In the grander scheme of things this fireplace, black, iron, its mouth sucking the eye towards it as soon as you enter the room, was not a huge problem, but still, it bothered me.

I worked through a series of solutions (including ripping it out, installing another off eBay, painting it in jolly colours as if we were louche Bloomsbury sex artists, or simply “getting over it”), but it took many years before I invited a decorative artist to crouch in our front room for a week and marble the thing.