As I don’t have much in the way of heirlooms I’ve been buying a selection of vintage children’s clothes, shoes, and several crochet and sewing patterns in order to turn them into memory objects of a kind. I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to connect these objects to myself and my explorations of inherited memory. Something of course caught my eye when I inspected them on-line, and I’m taking it from there, choosing one object at a time to focus on, acquaint myself with its qualities, see what comes. This little pair of Mary-Janes has been next to me on the floor for weeks now. I’ve weighed each shoe in my hands, inspected them inside and out, pondered ideas. They are startlingly tiny, about 10 cm in length, and made me think about how we perceive size in relation to other things or bodies.
They would fit a baby’s feet, before her first tumbling steps, but seem more like miniature girls’ than babies’ shoes. They look worn though, the leather upper is marked, and the ankle straps are coming loose. In comparison the soles are smooth and shiny, not so much scuffed as buffed, with a pleasing arch of nails’ heads buried in the heels. As part of my process I have photographed them and find the images interesting – they reveal details that escape the naked eye, make the shoes strange, less shoey, and so strip away some of the inherent cuteness and dangerous cliché-soaked sentiments.
I can’t think myself back that far, into such a young body, and have tried to remember instances when I was aware of my size as a child. What came to mind was a memory from secondary school, a frozen image. I must have been around ten years old: During a geography lesson given by a teacher whose sternness I found terrifying, I was standing in front of the class under a rather large map of the world hung from a high wooden stand. In my right I held a stick to point towards whatever the teacher (Frau Schmidt, I think) asked me about, feeling ever so small – in relation to the physical size of the map and what it represented, its stand towering above me; and in relation to the teacher who sat behind her desk but was no less intimidating for that; with the eyes of the class on me.
I’ve lived with the shoes for a while now and one day was unexpectedly led back to a child that almost was and who I have not thought about much before: my mom’s would-be baby-sister, who died with my grandmother during childbirth when my mother was two years old. This has given me a kind of anchor for the piece I want to make. I can’t consider any personal circumstances without paying attention to the time and place the child would have been born into, 1935 in East Prussia/Germany, so here’s a heavy heart. I’m also thinking of a book I read a couple of years ago, by Bert Hellinger, about a therapeutic method called family constellations or systemic constellations: some of the case studies revealed how a (psychically and/or physically) absent family member can for generations affect how a family functions, esp. if the existence of this person is not acknowledged, be it because of grief, shame, even unawareness…
Last week I had an art/life visit from the lovely Kate Murdoch who will be missed here in blog-land for her honest, thought- and insightful posts. We connected really well and have agreed to be each other’s positive mirrors in times of doubt and uncertainty about our respective art-practices. I can’t think of a better person to do this with.
