Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Nazareth O

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As part of my family history research (as described in my previous post), I chanced upon a name which leapt from the pages of an old parish register: Nazareth.

Nazareth was the wife of my 8th great-uncle William Oakley (born in St. Thomas’ parish, Oxford in 1673), and as things stand, that is all I know. But the more I’ve thought about her and who she was, the more I’ve considered how long she’s been forgotten, completely lost among the brier of ancient words that make up entries in the register. It’s strange to think that that is all that remains of her life; a fragment – a name scratched in ink on the pages of a book.

Who was she? What did she look like? What did she do in her life?

I thought then of recent work I’ve made which, based on textile fragments, aims to articulate the idea of a lost and distant life, lived well beyond that which remains. Nazareth Oakley is an example of someone who has all but been forgotten, but who, in the fact of her name written and later read in a register, is, in some small way, remembered and snatched at the last from oblivion.

I’ve been working on new ideas for work and a new piece (following on from a painting called Raspberry, named after someone else long since forgotten) which I have decided to call Nazareth O. 

Although this is very much at the research stage, I think giving it a title will help with its development. I’m beginning to see these developing into small packets, where the map is folded and things placed within based upon the title.

Several Johns and St. Thomas

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I’ve recently returned to researching my family tree – something I’ve been doing on and off since 2007, and have been following a line on my maternal grandfather’s side in my hometown of Oxford. My mother, like her father and grandfather, was actually born in Reading and it was something of a surprise to find that her ancestors (on her own paternal grandfather’s side) originated (as far as extant records show) in Oxford – the town to which she moved as a child with her family in 1952.

It was my great-great grandfather, Jabez Stevens who was the first Stevens to be born in Reading in December 1847 – his father, John, the last to be born in Oxford, in the parish of St. Aldates, in 1811. His father, my 4th great-grandfather, was born nearby in the parish of St. Martin’s in 1776 and baptised in a church that no longer stands (see image below), save for its 14th century tower, now known as Carfax Tower.

His father was also called John and married Lydia Borton in 1764 (Lydia was the daughter of Samuel Borton, an Oxford innkeeper who, along with his father (Richard) before him ran The Dolphin Inn in St. Giles). That was about as far as I’d got, but with the online availability of parish registers, I’ve now taken the line all the way back to another John Stevens, who, although I don’t know when he was born, died in St. Thomas Parish, Oxford, in 1681. This means of course, that he would have grown up in what was a tumultuous time in the city’s and country’s history – that is, the English Civil War.

John and his wife Jane had a son, another John, who was also born in St. Thomas’ parish in 1667. In 1695, he married Mary Oakley, born in the same parish in 1668 and together they had another John (1701-1747) who married another Mary and who had themselves yet another John who married, as I’ve written above, Lydia Borton in 1764.

St. Thomas’ Parish occupies an area which with the clearance of St. Ebbes in the 1960s and 70s and the subsequent development of the Westgate Shopping Centre was almost cut away from the rest of the town. Today it includes the castle and the ice-rink as well as Oxford station and of course, St. Thomas’ church which still stands. I think of it still as a nowhere place, a kind of hinterland where people enter or leave the town. Growing up, it was little more (in my mind at least) than a large car park and in my teenage years, the place where we’d go clubbing at The Coven. Discovering that my ancestors lived in this area over so many years has made me want to reconnect with that part of the city – first and foremost by visiting the parish church.

Looking online at information about the church, I found this photograph; an image of the gable of the south porch. The coat of arms carries the date 1621 and is therefore something my ancestors would have seen with their very own eyes.

Raspberry

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Continuing with my research, I’ve gone back a few years to some work I did on World War I, specifically an ‘observation’ made of a trench map and graphite paintings using that map as a basis for the work.

I’ve always liked the idea of using the map format as it articulates both the idea of place and of someone in that place. Combining it therefore with the recent work I’ve been doing on fabric tokens works well; the token describes an absence (and also, in some respect, a presence in that it’s a fragment of a lived life), while the map onto which it’s pinned articulates the space beyond that fragment. As I’ve written before:

“Every object in a museum, every relic (whether an object or building, or part of a building) is surrounded by space; that time and space from which they are now estranged. The fabric tokens in the Foundling Museum are likewise surrounded by space, into which the patterns seem to seep.”

The token, the seeping pattern and the map all combine therefore to articulate the ideas I’ve been working with over the years.

Using some folded paper, I made a sketch…

There is something about this pattern and the seeping image which somehow refers to childhood. Therefore I’ve decided to work this up into a bigger piece called ‘Raspberry’, named after a girl, Raspberry Hovel, who lived at the start of the 19th century  and who I discovered in my family history research.

This image also reminds me of mediaeval manuscripts  (the token being the drop-cap) and in some respects, the blankness surrounding the text is like the space I’ve described above. I’m always fascinated by annotations and marginalia in such works as they serve to bring us face to face with those who read those books hundreds of years ago. The seeping pattern becomes in a way a kind of marginalia.

Taking this further, I’m reminded of an installation I made in 2008/09 called ‘The Woods, Breathing.‘ This was based on my reading a book which Adam Czerniakow had read during the dark years of the Holocaust. A text work I made called ‘Heavy Water Sleep‘, based on that book, also lends itself perfectly to this form.

Tokens and Shadows

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A while ago I made some sketches at Shotover Wood, tracing shadows with ink.

Thinking back to these and with regards the work I’m currently making, I looked again at these sketches and applied the idea of the quick, gestural painting to the patterns. The shadow paintings, like the related video work, were themselves about absence, of time passing, something being there (the woods at a specific time) and now being absent (revealed only through their shadows). This seemed to chime with the idea of the fabric tokens as also being about absence.

Patterns Seeping (II)

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Following on from a previous blog (‘Patterns Seeping‘) I’ve been working on a few preliminary sketches using some fabric I recently purchased. The idea of the work is to show how when one is looking at an object (or any relic of the past), the mind tries to take that object back into the spaces it once occupied many years – maybe centuries – ago, and thereby to make a connection with those who have long since died.

With these ‘tokens’ therefore, the idea is to extended the pattern into the space of the paper surrounding it whilst avoiding a simple recreation of the pattern within those spaces. These are, as I’ve said, very much the beginnings of a thought process, but I like the way they seem to be heading.

‘Missded’ 4 – Tokens

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Having completed stitching the ‘Missded’ 4 canvas, I have now cut it up into tokens.

Patterns seeping

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With my latest set of tokens (for ‘Missded’ 4) I wanted to work with a few of them and try something new. As I’ve stated before, the tokens – the originals on which they’re based at the Foundling Museum – represent an individual given up; an individual made absent. They were the means by which the mother could claim her child back if she were once again able to look after him or her. Now, more than two hundred years later, they are the only means by which we can ‘know’ those children. Like everything that comes down to us from the past, much is anonymous and fragmentary.

For the purposes of my ‘Missded’ project, they represent my having my children to stay for a time before they return to their mum. In particular, they represent their absence in the days when I don’t see them. The patterns from which they’re cut, were drawings made by me and my son which were traced, cut and stitched together, representing the idea of a memory cherished and replayed, over and over. The drawings were made in an instant, but the process of making the stitched versions (the memory) took weeks and months.

Every object in a museum, every relic (whether an object or building, or part of a building) is surrounded by space; that time and space from which they are now estranged. The fabric tokens in the Foundling Museum are likewise surrounded by space, into which the patterns seem to seep.

With one of the tokens I made for ‘Missded’ 4, I wanted to somehow show that space – that absence, the ‘missingness’ as it were and so I thought of placing them within another canvas. The result can be seen below.

The thing which struck me with this was how the stitched lines of the token seemed to want to encroach on the space above and to the sides, reminding me how, when looking at objects in museums, one tries to push the boundaries of the object on display into the space that can’t be seen; the space of the distant past. It is, as I’ve said above, like the patterns seeping out from the fabric tokens. This token resembles the stems of a plant, which I think helped in that idea of growing out and beyond the limits of its own space.

So, although I like this image, it demands something else. The question is, how is that to be realised?

Cut Paintings

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I have some old paintings which have for many years been stored in a shed. I have nowhere else to put them and the shed is needed for other things. So having removed the canvases from the frames (the canvases were little worse for wear as a result of their not-ideal storage) I looked at the ‘Missded’ work I’ve done and wondered if they – the paintings – could be re-worked by cutting them down into similar sized pieces.

These paintings were originally created in response to historic traumas – such as the Holocaust and World War I – and also themes of absence and therefore the idea of creating smaller works seemed to make sense; the original tokens are after all – for wont of a much better, more appropriate word – a ‘transaction’ where someone – a child – has been given up. They are, as I have written previously, tokens of absence.

So as a test, I cut some ‘tokens’ from the original canvases and pinned them as I have the tokens made for my ‘Missded’ project.

As an addendum to this post, I was reminded of some work I did in regards to a fragment of pottery many years ago. The pottery shard can be seen below.

‘Missded’ 4

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I’ve finally finished stitching the fourth in the ‘Missded’ series of stitched works which I began some time ago. The complete piece, prior to being cut into ‘tokens’ can be seen below.

Locks III

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Progressing the images from my previous post, I’ve started to arrive at something more akin to what I had in mind from the outset.

The first in these three images in particular has the subtlety I am after, and, combining the three ‘locks’ gave me even more – something not entirely obvious once compressed for the web.

There’s something too of early Victorian photography in this image, in particular, the early experiments of the Henry Fox-Talbot such as the fern reproduced below.

Locks II

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Following a post I wrote back in 2017 (Locks) I’ve been looking again at the idea of creating small works using drawings made by my son and somehow reflecting the idea of the drawings as keepsakes and mementoes of times spent together. I took some of his drawings and using a lightbox, traced parts of them in both pen and pencil, trying to create images that were like locks of hair, the results of which can be found below.

Photographing work like this always strips it of its subtlety, but nonetheless, I was quite pleased with what I made. They don’t quite have the ‘lock of hair’ look I want just yet, but it’s a start.

‘Missded’ 2 – Tokens

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Having completed the stitching for ‘”Missded’ 2″, I’ve now cut it up to create the ‘tokens’ shown below.

My Son’s Drawings II

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I’ve written before about how I find inspiration in my young son’s drawings, or in how he draws. He drew this picture before breakfast one day and I was very taken aback by it, particularly the way he’d coloured it in, using (in the main) fairly neat blocks of different colours. It has inspired me to just draw, to not think too much about what one is drawing, or rather how one is drawing, but to just take, as Paul Klee famously said, the line for a walk.

It shares something with a painting he did some times ago in which again, he painted using blocks of individual colour.

‘Missded’ 2

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I recently completed the third (although titled as the second) in my series of stitched works based on drawings completed by me and my son several months ago. Tomorrow I will cut the piece up to create the ‘tokens’.

The original drawing is shown below:

‘Missded’ 3 – Tokens

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Having completed the stitching for ‘”Missded’ 3″, I’ve now cut it up to create the ‘tokens’ shown below.

‘Missded’ 3

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I’ve finally completed another of the stitched works – “‘Missded’ 3”.

Below is the original drawing made by me and my son.

‘Missded’ 1 – A Framed Token

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When one of the ‘tokens’ is put in a frame, it becomes a thing in its own right; a fragment still, but one quite divorced from the others and from that from which they were cut.

What started with this (a drawing made in seconds by me and my son):

became this (a stitched version made over several days):

and ended up as this (one of many ‘tokens’ cut from the above):

The following shows one of the tokens in a frame:

What this made me think about was how I would show these works: as individual objects such as that above or in a group? If there were several of these shown together, then their relationship to the original stitched work (and therefore the original drawn work) would be obvious. There would be a sense of the repetition of times when I’ve missed having the children. Grouping them together would therefore turn them into a work about remembering; remembering in those times when I haven’t had the children, what we did when in the times we spent together.

The original stitched work is about two things:

  • the  difference (in timespan) between those times when I have the children and when I have not. i.e. it’s an attempt to recreate a brief moment (the original drawing) in a form which takes many hours and days to complete
  • the act of remembering and savouring those particular moments, holding onto them in  times when I am on my own (the act of stitching is repetitive, akin to remembering something (or looking at a photograph) over and over again

The tokens made from this stitched piece are about the fragmenting of my time with my children. As an individual piece (such as that above) it’s about a time when I’ve said goodbye. Grouping them together therefore would show a lot of ‘goodbyes’ but also an equal number of ‘hellos’.

What I’m wondering now, as I’m about to complete the second of these stitched works, is whether when grouping a number of these fragments together (and as they are grouped together, so a wider memory is rediscovered) I should mix up the pieces, so that some from different drawings are placed alongside, after all, memory is not linear and memories often become mixed up with others. What will be palpable from seeing the grouped tokens is a sense of many goodbyes and indeed hellos; fragments of times when I’ve been without them and thinking of them, but on a positive note, a sense of many memories shared with them as well.

Morning Has Broken

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Following on from my last post, I’ve now completed all the tokens along with another piece comprising some of them stitched back together.

In the eighteenth century, some mothers would reclaim their children from the Foundling hospital and one supposes they might have also reclaimed the tokens left with them. Either way, the reclaiming of the tokens seemed a good way for me to articulate the time I spend with the children, as if my picking them up is a kind of reclaiming. The fact the number of days I have with them are far fewer than the number of days I don’t means I only wanted to use a small proportion of the tokens to create a new piece.

I called the new piece ‘Morning Has Broken’ after the Cat Stevens song, which my son and I were singing together.

Tokens of absence

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A few months ago I visited the Foundling Hospital in London, established in 1739 to receive and care for abandoned children. It was a deeply emotional experience, not least because of the tokens left by mothers with their babies as a means of identifying them both as parent and child. More often than not, these tokens were pieces of fabric (they now comprise Britain’s largest collection of 18th century textiles amounting to over 5000 items) pinned to sheets of paper on which a few basic facts about the child were recorded.

These pieces of fabric ultimately speak of the missing mother and in such small, seemingly insignificant objects one is faced with the remnants of an overwhelming sorrow. Perhaps, somewhere, the mother would have carried a similar piece which spoke to her of her absent child?

With my latest stitched works, I wanted to convey not only the contrast between the times I have my children and when I don’t, but also the sense of absence I carry around when they’re away, and so, inspired by the tokens, I made a cut in the work I’d recently completed.

Almost at once, these smaller pieces began to articulate what I often feel; that sense of absence which comes again and again, with more and more ‘tokens’ cut from the cloth.

‘Missded’ 1, stitched

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The stitched versions of my son’s drawings are objects which, in contrast to the quickly made drawings on which they’re based, take many hours to complete; a contrast that speaks of the difference between the relatively short times I have the children to stay and the long periods between their visits.

In those long periods, I content myself with thinking of the things we’ve done together, and as such our relationship often finds expression in the photographs I take and the various things they make when they’re here – like Eliot’s drawings. Ultimately therefore, these works are about absence and it’s that sense of absence which is starting to take this project in another direction…

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-18