24th February 2014
Weather: Spring in the air after tempests and floods.
Picking up the thread of a thought from back in June on lifespans.
(But first; just for anyone who is interested in the outcome of my broken van meltdown: I eventually bought a very cheap old VW transporter from a friend of a friend. Much smaller than the old Transit, but plain, simple and economic. It is doing fine for the moment.)
I think that I have breached blogging etiquette by the indecent interval that has elapsed since my last post. In truth, life has indeed been too short to blog over the last months whilst I have been dealing with one of those periodic log jams of events in life that has demand all my energy.
I have been clearing my mothers house. She is 92 and has been forced by Parkinsons into a nursing home. The family home has been empty for eighteen months and it is time to face the inevitable admission that she has to let it go. She was a librarian by profession and an archivist and cataloguer by nature and so sorting her house is like conducting an archaeological dig through the strata of our family life and further back into my parents’ individual pasts.
I am also re-discovering my own history through photos, hand written letters (a sad loss to the digital revolution in our lives) keepsakes and my old artwork from nursery school to art school and beyond. I am deeply immersed in taking stock of where I have come from and of possessions accumulated over several life spans to see what I want to take and what I want to let go of.
It is interesting to look at what I am keeping; what is important and why. Mostly it is things which represent a memory that are keys to more profound truths about myself and my life: photos of family holidays, a thumb pot made by my dad who I lost when I was 10, a letter from my mum; talismanic objects to keep in a box that you re-discover occasionally. But amongst these more serious items are some daft toys and memorabilia that raise a laugh and make you want to pass that laugh on to another generation. Amongst the forlorn boxes of stuff to go for house clearance, my brother and I once again fired the Dan Dare Space Gun at each other and carved up between us the Dinky car collection.
So back to units of time and life spans; we have had to condense my mother’s stuff into one room, but have distributed what remains amongst her grandchildren so that her life will continue to echo in theirs through the association of memory and object. The things I have kept are enabling me to reflect not only on where I have come from but where I want to go next. They are acting as a measure for my life in the way geological and archaeological strata mark the passage of time and history.
They may or may not become the subjects of artworks yet to be made, but they point the way forward for re-orienting my creative practice towards a more personal journey and being more choosey about the public commissions I apply for. My wife’s imminent retirement is also forcing a radical re-think of how we will make ends meet without her salary and in the absence of a significant pension. Greater self-reliance and a move towards self initiated work seems to be the way forward, but it is a slow and opaque process that has to be allowed to evolve in its own way. Meanwhile I am trying to tie up loose ends and make the space to create.
