I have alot of photographs on my walls. I have several prewar school photographs, mostly of vanished lives in Czechoslovakia, collected when I did an exchange in Prague for 3 months. I often look at those faces.
I also have other old photographs, mostly found in old frames, which I love to recondition and reuse. It's really one of my favourite things to get hold of old frames, take them apart, clean them and make use of them. I have gleaned best framing practice from seeing how they are put together.
This is a painting by my sister Mary. She paints, although she has never trained or really committed to it. Like me she was a musician - she played the violin, only she was really brilliant. Mary is one of the people I am closest to on earth, and I have a very complex relationship with her. I have five sisters, and so alot of complex relationships!
I made this years ago, amongst several similar. It has a mirror. I used to make batches of things to give as Christmas presents, and sometimes sell them on arty stalls, etc.
I don't have posters or prints, and mainly dislike other people's work in my eyesite at home. I do however have alot of framed things like vintage knitting patterns and book covers and magazines.
This is a magnetic piece or work Warp which is popular with visitors to the house. It was made for an exhibition at the oxo gallery, and is interactive, pushing and pulling the hand. It stands in a corner next to a wooden black and white painting thing. I remember showing that piece in a group crit during my degree and getting absolutely slated for it. That was the low point of the degree - I had a mismatched tutor and the whole emphasis was highly conceptual or nothing in his opinion.
These are what you would call pre instructional paintings. The only real reason I haven't continued painting are purely practical, concerning space and time. Perhaps I will take up painting when I retire at 90.
This is about my favourite object in the world, made by Hannah when she was about eight.
I actually bought this beautiful preraphaelite drawing. (at a jumble sale for 63p about 15 years ago). It is by A.M. Micholls, about whom I have never been able to find out anything.
More things, sheet music, an old manuscript, tarnished mirror, all transformed into treasures.
A photograph of my father as a boy form the late 1920's. He is wearing a clown costume made for him by his mother who died of consumption the next year. I used this image in my degree dissertation, about time and reality.
My dad brought this head back from Africa after WW2. It always sat on top of the piano at home, and I always loved the shape of his head.
A lovely piece, Perhaps, made by my friend Liz Collini, who I was at university with. She asked me what my favourite word is, and made this as part of a seies for her degree show. This one is very crumbly, and the shelf needs hoovering occasionally.
More photographs of mine from a few years ago.
Me and Hannah.
This is some tree bark I have been sewing together to make a coat to hang from a tree if ever I get asked to do a site specific work in a wood. I have a box of ironed bark waiting. that's a fumey job - ironing bark.
There is more, and more and more. And stones, and metals and wood and other favourite and meaningful objects.
Things you live with - you don't always see them for a long time, then they suddenly reassert their presence and meaning.
16th April 2011
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