Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Home
  • Artwork
    • Selected Works
    • Galleries
      • A Moment’s Language
      • Installations
        • Murder
        • The Woods, Breathing
        • The Woods, Breathing (Texts)
      • Photographs
        • The Trees
        • Shotover
        • Pillars of Snow
        • Places
        • Textures
        • Walk to work
        • Creatures
      • Photographic Installations
        • St. Giles Fair 1908
        • Cornmarket 1907
        • Headington Hill 1903
        • Queen Street 1897
        • Snow (details)
        • The Wall
      • Stitched Work
        • ‘Missded’ Tokens
        • ‘Missded’ 1 – Tokens
        • ‘Missded’ 2 – Tokens
        • ‘Missded’ 3 – Tokens
      • Miscellaneous
        • Remembered Visit to Birkenau
        • Somewhere Between Writing and Trees
        • Tracks
        • Portfolio
        • Posters for Exhibitions
        • T (Crosses)
        • Backdrops
        • Correspondence (details)
    • Continuing Themes
      • Missded
      • Lists
      • Heavy Water Sleep
      • The Trees
      • The Gentleman’s Servant
      • Fragment
      • Notebook
  • Blog
  • Exhibitions
    • A Line Drawn in Water
    • A Line Drawn in Water (Blog)
    • Mine the Mountain 3
    • Mine the Mountain 2
    • The Woods, Breathing
    • Snow
    • Echo
    • Murder
    • The Tourist
    • Dreamcatcher
    • Mine the Mountain
    • M8
    • Umbilical Light
    • The Gate
    • Creatures
    • Residue
    • A visit to Auschwitz
  • Video
    • The Gone Forest
    • Look, trees exist
    • Look, trees exist (WWI postcard)
    • Videos from ‘A Line Drawn in Water’
  • Family History
  • About Me
  • Subscribe to Nicholas Hedges
  • Eliot Press

Thoughts about my Nan

September 27, 2010 by Nicholas Hedges

As I stood in the church hall following the service of thanksgiving for my Nan who died on September 16th at the age of 98, I looked towards the stage at the back of the hall, through the door on the left hand side and into the short corridor behind. At that moment, in a split second, a number of memories crashed down around me, as if the way I was standing – the shape of my body – had unlocked the door behind which they’d been piled. The Christmas Bazaar, when I was a child was one of them, in particular the lucky dip box filled with sawdust and prizes. That was the first. It had stood there, just before the stage near the steps. I can still smell the sawdust; I can feel it on my hands as I search, in my mind, for a prize. Father Christmas had always made an appearance and would hand out gifts in his grotto. It was, in many ways when Christmas began, even though it was always held in the last week of November. It was at the Christmas Bazaar that I bought Nan a hideous ornament – china flowers in a china pot; gaudy coloured and chipped.

When I heard my Nan had died (I was on holiday in Spain at the time) my mind, for some reason, took me into the room which once ran the width of the church behind the large cross at the front. It was once an open gallery (you can see it in a photo of my aunt and uncle’s wedding), but had long since been blocked off from the church. Back then, when I was a child, it was always full of junk. It was where Father Christmas has his Grotto, and whatever the time of year, there was something of Grotto about it, with or without the old man in the red suit.

Back in the hall on the day of my Nan’s funeral, I could see the stage in my mind’s eye complete with the box at the front, one which ran the length of the stage, which when it was opened revealed a long line of lightbulbs. When I was a child, most of the bulbs were missing. You could see the sockets and the wires, but they hadn’t been used for years. There was a lighting box on the left hand side – just before the door through which I was looking – in which the old switches and levers had become grown over with time. In the single wooden panel, dividing it from the stage, was a hole through which you could see what was going on. My cousin and I had operated a tape player in there, some time in the mid 1980s for the performance of a pantomime whose name for the moment escapes me.

Inevitably, as I write, my thoughts are going to wander, as one memory leads to another, but back on the day of my Nan’s funeral, I thought about what I’d just remembered; the lucky dip, the Christmas Bazaar and the lightbulbs underneath the box. These were not isolated memories, they didn’t come to me like pictures in a gallery, one after the other. Instead they were physical and part of a web of memories, the threads of which seemed to vibrate with all that I had felt and experienced before. For a moment, when I moved, I could almost feel them again, I could hear the hubbub of the bazaar, see the stalls piled with jumble and the Christmas decorations hanging above. I was in the company of people who’d long since gone.

The photo below is of my Aunt and Uncle’s wedding reception, which took place in the hall. Very little has changed, apart from all the people.

Back to the day my Nan died – it’s interesting that my first thought was of the room immediately behind the church, but hardly surprising when you consider, that along with my Grandad, she’d lived in a house just opposite the hall. The house and the church were linked by Sundays, on which day we would cross the road to the house to select our sweets from the sweet-tin. Bon-bons, lemon sherbets, candied peanuts, mint imperials… we could choose 5, 6 or 7; the number changed from week to week. I can see the tin now – a round biscuit tin, I can hear the sweets rattle as the lid is prised off.

 Whenever we slept at Nan’s, my brother and I would find paper bags beneath our pillows in the morning, with a few sweets inside. Before bed, we’d have Ritz biscuits and grated cheese whilst watching TV. The television was one that had to warm up before the picture was fully revealed. I’m always reminded of Boxing Day when I think of the front room. That and the Two Ronnies – and in particular the Phantom Raspberry Blower. Seaside Summer Special too. I can feel the texture of the chairs and the sofa. It’s the afternoon on Boxing Day as I think of it now, and while some have gone to the football, everyone else stays in the warm, getting things ready for tea; cold meats, pickles etc.

I remember once, when I was 5 or 6, when my brother and I slept over at my Nan’s. It was in the summer, late at night. The night was warm and a storm was brewing. We couldn’t sleep and at about 11 or 12 o’clock, my Nan came upstairs and asked if we wanted to run around in the garden. Of course we did, and so out we went, into the garden with Nan as the storm approached. It was a simple thing, but in many ways a magical one. Back then, as can be seen from the photograph above, there was a large apple tree in the garden which I remember vividly that night. It’s gone now. A house has been built on top.

In the 1980s, the church was remodelled, with the space between the church and the church hall – which until then had been open to the elements – covered over. Many of the rooms were also remodelled. It was necessary, and no doubt it made the church more comfortable, but of course something was inevitably lost as a result, just as it was when the church itself was changed several years before. The corridor down which I’d looked from the front of the church hall, had once been part of a single room in which we had our Sunday school classes. I remember the tiny chairs and the out-of-tune piano in the corner. Leaving this room, you’d find yourself outside. A door straight ahead led to the toilet (always cold and full of spiders) and one to the left into the gallery room – or Santa’s Grotto. To the left, after the door to the Gallery Room and the just before the loo, a flight of metal steps led down to the church. A green gate blocked the way to the street, while the steps themselves were hazardous by today’s standards, especially in winter. I can still hear the sound they made as you walked down. At the bottom, you turned left and in front of you was another room (The Fellowship Room) and another toilet opposite (even colder and with even more spiders). In my mind it’s always damp here. I can always see puddles outside, and in the Fellowship Room there is the smell of old clothes; costumes which were always kept in a walk-in cupboard (blankets for Shepherds in the Nativity).

Filed Under: Family History Tagged With: Death, Family History, Memory, Nan

Highgate Cemetery

May 6, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

I’d known about Highgate cemetery, principally as the last resting place of Karl Marx, but this was the first time I had visited it. Having left Archways Tube station, I walked up Highgate Hill, through the pleasant surroundings of Waterlow Park and found my outside a large iron gate, standing amongst a small group of people waiting to go in. The cemetery itself is divided into two sections; the older West and the newer East. The East side can be visited at any time, but the West can only be accessed as part of a guided tour. It was for this tour that we along with a dozen others waited our turn.

I had the feeling that we were queuing to be let inside a prison. Not that I’ve ever queued for such a reason. It was simply the fact that we were locked outside waiting for our appointed time to visit, when those kept behind the walls would be allowed to receive us (there is something similar too in the architecture of the gatehouse and that which one sees in some Victorian prisons). Also, I couldn’t help but think of King Kong – the wall and the gates behind which the giant beast was kept. There was certainly a sense of anticipation, which had, it seems, been in part been created by the cemetery’s architect Stephen Geary.

Highgate Cemetery

The way into the cemetery itself, from the courtyard, is via a flight of steps. When standing in the courtyard, the cemetery cannot be seen; it’s only when walking through the archway leading to the steps, at the top of which one can see the greenery and the first of the monuments, that this vast cemetery is slowly revealed.

There is certainly more than a hint of theatre in how one enters, and the fact one ascends the stairs into the world of the dead serves to reflect a belief in the continuity of life after death; by ascending the steps we follow in the footsteps of those long since passed away, as if they were not borne here by pallbearers, horses and hearse, but had walked here themselves. Their lives continue and of course life continues through our present-day visiting.

It is this which makes the place feel strangely alive. That is not to suggest of course that those interred within are indeed still living in the physical sense of the word, but that the memory of their lives is almost tangible. Many of those buried here would have enjoyed the finer things that Victorian life could offer, things which we modern-day visitors can only know through books, films and television. These people lived the lives that we can only imagine.

Highgate Cemetery

I do not wish however to over-romanticise their lives, by suggesting that they were all happy and spent their time at balls, dressed in splendid costumes; that their lives were indeed little more than costume dramas; that would be naive to say the least. But nonetheless, as I walked around the cemetery, I was aware as I read the names on the tumbledown, but nonetheless impressive monuments, that the names inscribed upon them – or at least some of them, particularly in the Circle of Lebanon (which reminded me, in some respects, of the Great Crescent in Bath which we’d visited the day before) – would have been known in society. They would have called to mind faces, voices, attitudes and characters where today they are labels for empty spaces.

The Victorian attitude to death – the strong belief in the afterlife which I’ve already mentioned – is clearly apparent in this cemetery; religion was of course very important to them. Strange then that they should choose to design their funerary monuments in the style of Ancient Egyptian tombs and temples. Perhaps this was as much down to the fashion of the time as anything else, but could it also be that the Ancient Egyptians’ attitude to death and remembrance was somehow a confirmation of a continued existence? That’s not to say – and this goes without saying – that Victorians shared in the Polytheistic beliefs of the Pharaohs, but that the very age and ancient duration of their (the Pharaohs’) memory, which had and has spanned several millennia, promised an afterlife of a different kind; one that would be shared with living. Alongside the immortality of the soul, the endurance of the name was also important.

Highgate Cemetery

Such large and elaborate monuments are rebuttals of death itself. They are large and elaborate parts of the living world and, it could be argued, belie the uncertainty of a continued heavenly existence. They occupy a space in the land of the living, just as did the deceased, and when we read a name, we hear within our minds, albeit silently, the sound of a name that was spoken countless times. We hear it muffled, like bells were muffled at times of death.

I was reminded when reflecting on this of some work I did on Old Musical Instruments in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It might sound obvious, but having studied materials used in the making of a Lira di Braccio as well as its shape, I became aware that it was so designed and made so as to make a sound. Names too are like this. They are given so as to be said.

Considering the perpetuity of names and memory amidst the slow convulsions of the ground , I coudn’t help but think of the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, who in Urne Burial, published in 1658, wrote some of the most beautiful lines ever put down on the subject of mortality and remembrance:

“And therefore restlesse inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto present considerations seems vanity almost out of date, and superanuated peece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names as some have done in their persons, one face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. ‘Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, our time may be too short for our designes. To extend our memories by Monuments, whose death we dayly pray for, and whose durations we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations. And being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.
[…]There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers finde their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our Survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce fourty years; Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks. To be read by bare Inscriptions like many in Gruter, to hope for Eternity by Ænigmaticall Epithetes, or first letters of our names, to be studied by Antiquaries, who we were, and have new Names given us like many of the Mummies, are cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting Languages.
[…]Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us.”

Walking in the Circle of Lebanon (reached by a gateway which itself could be a cast off from a production of Aida) one couldn’t help but think of the families entombed within the sepulchres and, as I’ve already written, the lives which they led in Victorian society. The dead names carved in the stone were now as hollow and as empty as whatever lay behind the closed doors. And up beyond the Circle of Lebanon, the once wealthy inhabitants of the cemetery, far from the whirligig of their colourful lives were now just bones turned over in the soil. The trees, growing all around, seemed to be reaching with their roots deep into the ground like a man searching for change in his pockets, elbowing their way between the tombstones, staggering amongst the ivy trusses, as if driven mad by the idea of nothing.

Highgate Cemetery

In a recent study of another cemetery, this time in Wolvercote, Oxford, I came to the conclusion through a particular process of observation, that there were no such things as cemeteries. Well, of course there are cemeteries, but in a wider, more holistic view there is just the cycle of birth, life and death, whether those cycles are applied to the existences of human beings, animals or leaves. Where those leaves fall and where bodies are laid to rest is in the end quite irrelevant.

Highgate Cemetery itself was saved because of the threat of development. For many years it was left to decay, grown over with ivy, brambles and trees and suffering from vandalism. Unchecked, this cemetery could have disappeared along with all the names and their monuments. Thankfully, through the dedication of a relatively small number of people, the cemetery remains a place that we can visit today. But why is it we do so?

Highgate Cemetery

There are of course many reasons why a place like Highgate is of interest, not least from a purely historical perspective. The Victorian attitude towards death is a subject in itself, as are the styles and designs of the various funerary monuments. But for many of us who visit I think the reasons run much deeper.

The monuments we see were put there for us. As we walk, we try to imagine the lives of those who lived a century before we were even born, when we did not exist. And now, when the those who lived back then, exist only in the hollow shell of their names, so we cast our eyes to the future when our names will also no longer be spoken.
Back in 2007, Monika and I visited Pere Lachaise and Montmartre cemeteries in Paris, and reflecting on our visits I wrote:

“Cemeteries have something in common with old photographs, particularly when we consider the the writing of Roland Barthes who writes that photographs have within them the ‘catastrophe of death,’ and that, ‘in the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…’. In cemeteries too, Time is somehow engorged and contains in abundance that catastophe. One has the impression of time standing still, stopped by the dates of death carved into the many gravestones and tombs, yet we know, all too well, that time continues.”

Perhaps it’s Time, engorged within the bounds of the cemetery that skews the gravestones and monuments.

As I wrote earlier, the people buried in this cemetery lived lives that we can only imagine. Similarly, their existence now is one that we can only conceive at the very limits of our imaginations. My aunt once said to me, “you have to believe in something,” ergo, you can’t believe in nothing. And this is certainly true, I can’t imagine nothing, whether that nothing is all the time before I was born or all the time that will come after my death. Cemeteries, like any historical record, building or object tell us there was something and that there always will be something.

Cemeteries point to both our past and future non-existence at a moment when we feel the present most acutely.

As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in his conclusion to Urne Burial:

“‘Tis all one to lye in St Innocents* Church-yard, as in the Sands of Ægypt: Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrainus**.
*in Paris where bodies soon consume.
**A stately Mausoleum or sepulchral pyle built by Adrianus in Rome, where now standeth the Castle of St. Angelo.

Filed Under: Goethean Observations, Trees Tagged With: Barthes, Catastrophe, Cemetery, Death, Goethean Observation, Highgate Cemetery, Instruments, Montmartre, Music, Sir Thomas Browne, Urne Burial

Elijah Noon (1838-1885)

November 19, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Elijah was the son of Elijah and Charlotte Noon whose tragic story I have already written about in ‘A Murder in Jericho‘. With Elijah Jr, tragedy it seems was waiting to strike the family again, for on 26th May 1885, at the Grapes Inn on George Street Oxford (which still stands today), he choked to death.
At an inquest held before the city coroner E. L. Hussey Esq. William Timms, a relative of Noon’s and the Landlord of the Inn gave evidence. The following is taken from the report in Jackson’s Oxford Journal, printed on May 30th 1885.

“On Wednesday at the Grapes Inn, George Street, on the body of Elijah Noon who died suddenly at that house on Tuesday – J Childs, landlord of the Inn, said he knew the deceased. He thought he was about 46 years of age. On Tuesday morning a little after ten, a man named Timms and his wife, relations of Noon, came in accompanied by the deceased. He heard Timms say he was going to Birmingham. He did not see Noon eat anything, but he had some beer which Timms gave him. The next thing he saw was the deceased gasping for breath. Timms caught him and thinking he was choking, patted him on the back, at the same time telling him to put his finger down his mouth. Noon soon after died, getting a little black in the face. He did not vomit. He sent for a doctor, but he came too late to be of any assistance – William Timms of Birmingham, a relative of the deceased, said that on the day in question they walked from Summertown with his (witness’s) wife. Deceased bought some pigs chitterlings at a shop in George Street which he eat [sic] going along. They all went into the Grapes Inn and had some beer. Noon began eating, and all at once he saw him turn black in the face. He patted him on the back but all the deceased did was to beat his chest, He managed to drink a little beer and then fell back dead into his arms. He had known him some years, and had not heard he was short of breath. A Juryman mentioned that the deceased was a well-known whistler which, he thought, showed he was in good health. Verdict ‘Death from Accidental Choking’.

Below is a contemporary (c.1900) photograph of the Grapes Inn. Of all the victorian facades, this is the only one left standing today.
The Grapes

Filed Under: Oxford Tagged With: Death, Elijah Noon, Family History, Newspaper Cutting, Oxford

Death Flowers of the Mines

October 13, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

The following is an extract taken from a book which I remember from my childhood. The book, ‘Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain’ is owned by my Nan and it was whilst seeing her yesterday that I saw the book again. Flicking through and looking for myths associated with Wales I found the following:

“Underground coal-mining began in Wales over 400 years ago and, since then, generations of miners have faced a daily struggle against darkness and danger. Belief in the Supernatural came easily to those who were constantly threatened by sudden disaster and superstition was rife among coal-mining communities. It was unlucky to be late for work, or to forget something and return home for it. If, on his way to work, the miner met someone with a squint, or a rabbit or bird crossed his path, he would go home for the day. Whenever anyone in his family dreamt of death, an accident or broken shoes, a mire was often forced to stay at home by his frightened relatives on the day after the dream.
Ever since Christ was crucified on a Friday, the day has been associated with bad luck. in South Wales, many colliers refused to start new work on any Friday, referred to as ‘Black Friday’, but especially on one preceding a holiday when miners in Monmouthshire would complain of having ‘the old black dog’ on their backs, an evil spirit which caused illness and accidents. Throughout Wales, pitworkers stayed away from the mines on Good Friday, but there were other days when they missed work for reasons unconnected with foreboding… 

The sight of a robin, pigeon or dove flying above the pithead was thought to foretell disaster, and many miners refused to work if such birds were seen near the mines. They were also called ‘corpse birds’ and are said to have been seen before the explosion at the Senghennydd Colliery in Mid Glamorgan in 1913, when over 400 pitworkers died in the worst mining disaster in Welsh history. In the mines themselves, whistling and the word ‘cat’ were strictly taboo. 

In 1890, miners at the Morfa Colliery near Port Talbot reported many eerie manifestations which occurred in the neighbourhood and in the mine itself. Fierce hounds, known locally as ‘the Red Dogs of Morfa’ were seen running through the district at night. The colliery was filled with a sweet rose-like perfume emanating from invisible ‘death flowers’. Cries for help and sounds of falling earth were heard and flickering lights, called ‘corpse candles’, appeared in the tunnels. The ghosts of dead miners and coal trams drawn by phantom white horses were seen, and rats swarmed out of the mine. On March 10, nearly half the workers on the morning shift stayed at home. Later that day there was an explosion at the colliery and 87 miners were buried alive and died in the disaster.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Death, Flowers, Mine, Myth, Nan

A Suicide in Cefn-y-Crib

July 24, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Back in the spring when I visited Hafodyrynys with my Dad and my girlfriend Monika, we found ourselves – whilst clambering over what my grandmother has always called the ‘Mountain’ – in the company of a farmer, who, with his two sheepdogs, took us on a short tour of his land overlooking the village. He was a man who having been brought up in the area knew that part of the world intimately, and who, as he traced the blue horizon with his hand, reeled off a list of villages resting amongst the hills and fields rolled out below. As we looked over towards the town of Llanhilleth, where my great-grandfather, Elias Jones, had worked as a miner, I couldn’t help but imagine him standing there 100 years before, looking at the same villages and reeling off the same names. Down below, in Rectory Road, he would see the house in which he lived, and in which also lived my grandmother as a child.
Elias Jones died of lung disease in 1929 at the age of 47, caused as a result of breathing in coal dust down the mine in which he worked. He was buried in the churchyard at Cefn-y-Crib, where his wife, Mary Jane, would be buried 40 years later. Also buried in the same churchyard, as we saw that day, was Elias Jones’ father, my great-great-grandfather, Henry, who died in 1889 at the age of 49 when Elias was just 7 years old.

Hafodyrynys and Surrounds

We could see the churchyard from the brow of a hill as we stood in the company of the farmer and his dogs, and in between, a scattering of buildings, vivid and white against the green of the fields, made darker for a moment by the looming presence of clouds which gathered around us as if to experience a view which they would know for only a very short time.

Hafodyrynys and Surrounds

It was as we looked that the farmer pointed to one of the buildings and explained how in December the previous year a young woman was found hanged inside. It was a story which seemed at odds with the beauty of the landscape – a landscape which, nevertheless, just as it had shaped the existence of my paternal family, had shaped the death of this young woman.

In amidst the fields, the seemingly empty barns and houses, and bordered by the forests which clung to the hills surrounding us, one could feel very small and insignificant. In a place such as this one’s awareness of self is augmented, or at least, one’s awareness of individuals. Indeed, of all the people I have researched so far, the two which to me are perhaps the most clearly defined are my great-grandfather, Elias, and my great-great-uncle, Jonah Rogers, who was killed in 1915 in the second battle of Ypres. Perhaps this is in part because of the place in which they lived (and in which that day I was standing), not so much because it’s changed so little, but because its shape, its beauty and its timelessness, serve to delineate the individual better than any city.

I’d always heard that one of my ancestors on the Welsh side of the family had been killed in a mining accident, but I’ve never found anything to even vaguely corroborate the story. Of course accidents were common as my grandmother recalled, remembering how blinds would be drawn in all the windows when another body was brought back up to the surface. Having seen Henry Jones’ grave, I decided to obtain a copy of his death certificate to see if perhaps he – having died young – had been killed in an accident of some kind. As it turned out, the truth was indeed tragic, but for altogether different reasons.
It took me a while to decipher the spider-like writing of the registrar, but suddenly it hit me; cause of death, “suicide while temporary insane,” place of death; Cefn-y-Crib.

Filed Under: Family History Tagged With: Death, Elias Jones, Family History, Family Jones, Hafodyrynys, Jonah Rogers, Jones

Bereavement

February 4, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

I wrote the following en-route to Berlin, shortly after my step-father, Robert Ross was first admitted to the Sobell House Hospice. I returned from Berlin yesterday and Robert, as I have written in a previous post, died peacefully this morning, aged 63.

“Mourning, or rather bereavement is the shock at discovering oneself, of seeing for the first time the shape, texture and colour of objects by which one has been surrounded for years. For some, this shock is too much to bear and things are given away, sold off or moved; suddenly ugly, the reason for their ever being placed on shelves impossible to fathom. Through the death of a loved being, we become through a period of mourning, the newly born child, existing for a time without a name. Without a name of our own we borrow that of the loved one, we hold on to it, we trace the shape of its letters, as if they were the contours of an effigy on their tomb.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bereavement, Death, Rob

Robert Ross (1944-2008)

February 4, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

This morning, at Sobell House in Oxford, my step-father Robert Ross died peacefully aged 63. He’d been ill for many years although for much of that time one wouldn’t have known on account of the tremendously postive attitude he showed towards his illness. Diagnosed with cancer in 1996, he underwent major surgery and was later diagnosed with secondary cancer of the lungs and liver. Given a year to live, he started work on a book ‘Counselling as a Career’ which he later published, and continued to appear in musicals, plays and pantomimes put on by the Lime Walk Players; some of which he wrote himself, namely; ‘Climb Every Mountain,’ ‘The Awkward Squad,’ and ‘The Rub of the Green.’ He also wrote a play inspired by his experiences, ‘The Guiding Hand,’ which he put on at the Old Fire Station in Oxford. I myself was privileged to see him perform the title role in a musical I myself penned entitled ‘Merlin!’ in February 2004.

With the second diagnosis proving incorrect, Robert was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2003. Two years ago, the stress of his illness began to take its toll and increasingly over the course of last year, despite moments when his health picked up a little, his condition, as a whole began to deteriorate. This deterioration increased at the end of the year and just over a week ago he was admitted to The Sobell Hospice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Death, Rob

Gaps

April 25, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

“Possibly the most startling thing about our individual existence is that it is continuous… We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights’…

If things are perceived as discrete parts or elements they can be rearranged. Gaps become more interesting as places of shadow…”

Bill Viola, ‘Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House‘

Whilst flicking though my research journal this evening, I happened upon the above quote which I first read several months ago. I was startled by what I read, particularly in light of what I wrote yesterday (‘From Dinosaurs to Human Beings’). This continuous existence which Viola speaks of, could be said to be that same existence of which we and all our ancestors are a part, and to memory and sleep as creators of ‘discrete parts’ or ‘highlights’ we might add ‘death’.

These discrete elements can be rearranged, and in doing so, gaps will inevitably appear (I’ve discovered as much through the process of walking and making notes of objects etc.) and it is these gaps, these shadows which I have been working with and in which I am most interested.

Filed Under: Artist in Residence Tagged With: Artist in Residence, Bill Viola, Death, Residue

A Single Death is a Tragedy

April 18, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

On my way into OVADA this morning, I saw the tragic sight of a young man lying dead in the road. Evidently he’d been the victim of a traffic accident, a cyclist. What had happened isn’t clear, but it seems he was in collision with a dustbin lorry. Covered by a sheet, his feet sticking out from underneath, he lay in the road as paramedics and policemen stood around him. I have never seen a dead body before, and the sight was one both shocking and very, very sad. After these last months, working with themes such as life and death, and in particular the deaths of hundreds upon thousands of people, it was only at that moment, on seeing this poor man, that I saw just what death was. ‘A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic’ – how very true this is.

As I left the scene and made my way to the gallery, everything around me seemed heightened; colours, sounds – life in general. The everyday was for a moment rather otherworldly. People still smiled, shops were open for business, buses left the bus station. The sun shone, buildings all around remained standing: life carried on as normal, just as it always does. I suppose, this morning, I saw mortality for the first time – that, and the resilience of the city.

It was later in the day, that I became aware of something else: eternity. Just as imagining the deaths of millions of people is – to say the least – difficult, so contemplating eternity is quite impossible. However, I have always considered that the only way to contemplate the mass deaths of the Holocaust or the carnage of the battlefields of World War One, is to find the individuals caught up in the horror. In effect, one must try and break things down into smaller pieces. The same could be said of eternity, the infinite, and as I walked around town this afternoon, I was aware of the time that had passed since this morning’s tragic events, the minutes and the hours – the first minutes and hours of the dead man’s eternal rest.

Filed Under: Artist in Residence Tagged With: Artist in Residence, Death, Residue

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-20

Subscribe
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Copyright © 2023 · Outreach Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in