Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

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.

‘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.

‘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’ 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…

‘Missded’ 1

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The images below show the three stages (so far completed) of the first in a series of works entitled “Missded”. The word ‘missded’ is one my son used when he’d said he’d missed me: “I missded you daddy”.

The first image is the original drawing we made together, the second is the tracing I made of that drawing and the third, the canvas onto which I have outlined the pattern (having cut out the shapes from the tracing).

It was a difficult job, trying to cut such difficult shapes – and to remember where they were meant to go on the canvas – but that uncertainty and the lack of accuracy reflects in some ways the theme of the work itself; the remembered act, that is, me and my son drawing together.

What was interesting was the difference between the making of the drawing and the creation of the template, in that the original drawing is very much about the lines we made whereas the template is much more concerned with the spaces between – the shapes which I could cut out and draw around.

Again this somehow reflects the nature of the work’s theme; that is missing someone. The days on which I do see my children are the lines outlining the gaps when I don’t – the spaces in between. This could become a whole other area which I shall explore later.

Tracings

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When you’re a father, separated from your children a few days each week, the things you do with your children when you have them become especially precious. I find I take more photographs when I have them as they somehow sustain me in the days when I don’t see them. The same applies to the things they make; drawings, paintings and so on.

A few weeks ago, Eliot asked me to do some drawings with him, whereby he would draw on the page and I would follow the line he made. It was a very simple thing, but he loved it, and the images we made were lovely.

It’s drawings like these which become so important in those days when I don’t have the children, and, as I mentioned in my last post, these in particular seem to lend themselves to work I made a few years back, where I would stitch ‘images’ from sources such as GPS data (taken from walks), or old trench maps.

As a start, I began by tracing the drawings using the same felt-tips as we used in the original drawings. Given that these stitched works will, in some respects, be about memory, the fact these tracings are not entirely accurate, alludes nicely to the idea of memory itself not being an entirely accurate draughtsman.

As I drew them (the time difference between the ‘moment’ in which they were made and the length of time it took me to trace them also alludes to the idea of working to recapture a moment in the past) I piled them up and began to appreciate the aesthetic of the piles of tracings, where previous drawings would show through.

I’ve always loved drawings or paintings with scribbles and lines and these piles seemed to point to another way of using these drawings – another possible outcome. It was only when I did the same with tracings I made in pencil that another possible work began to emerge, one which was exactly in keeping with the idea of memory, family and recovering past times.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024