My work has always been, in part, an attempt to know the past as a present-day, lived experience; to empathise with those who lived before me and see the natural world as they would have seen it, before so much was lost.
In 2018 I visited the Foundling Museum in London, established as The Foundling Hospital in 1739 to receive and care for abandoned children. It was an emotional experience, not least because of the scraps of fabric left by mothers with their babies; a means of identifying their child in the event they might reclaim them in the future. Amounting to over 5000 items, this sad catalogue is Britain’s largest collection of 18th century textiles.
When we attempt to engage with the past, often what is left – whether a name, a ruin, an object or story – is like those scraps of fabric, and the dress from which the fabric was cut, the world from which they’re estranged. In our mind’s eye, we can take the scrap and attempt to extend its pattern to form a view of the world long gone; the dress from which it was cut, the woman who wore it, the streets down which she walked. Whether a name, a ruin, an object or story, the process is the same; we take a fragment and, in our imaginations, extend it.
But in this endeavour we are always like a parent, claiming a child with a mismatched pattern, pointing out the parts that rhyme, aware of those which don’t.
And it’s in the dissonance and rhyme that much of my work is located.
Recently, I have begun a new series of works (above) where two different patterns are joined together to create a single piece. These patterns will eventually be printed onto fabric and stitched together but at the moment they exist as prototype designs. In the main, the two fabrics will be different, but there will be parts where the patterns rhyme, illustrating that in order to empathise with someone who lived in the past, we have to find the common thread – the rhyme – which binds our otherwise dissonant lives. Most likely, that ‘thread of experience’ will be our experience of nature; the feel of the sun, the wind and rain; the experience of walking amidst trees and watching the play of light and shadows on the ground. Or seeing the sun in a blue sky and the moon on a starry night.
So far I’m very happy with the way the work is progressing. The images above are prototype designs which I will eventually work up to incorporate natural elements, particularly trees in response to the shadow videos and paintings I have made in forests.
It doesn’t matter how different our lived experiences are; we all shared an experience of the natural world. As Paul Fussell wrote: “…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”
That is what these works will do; propose moments of pastoral, of common experience which then can allow us to empathise with people in the past, whatever their lives were like.