It’s not a bit like the Walton’s (it’s not like Eastender’s either), a performance (2010) brings together many of these concerns though an exploration of the tension between the Ideal Family that is still promoted by both state and media and our lived experience of the complexity and diversity of human relationships.
As so often with my work, the idea grew out of personal experience. My own family is typical, with blood ties, adoptions, divorce, step families and live in partners complicating the somehow still expected two parents, 2.4 children and various grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins (though even the Ideal Family is a far from a simple organism). All of us bound together by an assortment of emotions from love and friendship to habit and shared experience.
The crib, in which my own children had once slept, relegated to the back of a garage and with its various screws and bolts missing, struck me as an interesting metaphor for the way we try to build family connections and then work to keep them together. In a rich and diverse culture nothing can be taken for granted. Couples are male and female in any combination as are parents. Children are adopted, fostered or created with or without the intervention of medical technology. Siblings are full, half or step related and all these variations and more I haven’t mentioned, come together as families that love and fight and hate and forgive. No, family is definitely not a bit like The Walton’s!
Beginning as an installation the work has evolved over time as my research helped to mature and clarify my thoughts. The political promise to reward marriage through taxation drew my attention to the way the establishment continued to support a kind of Platonic Ideal that is no longer the only viable pattern. In a society that promotes consumer choice, it seems that not all choices have equal value. Working through several variations I finally realised that just as family building is an activity that happens in real time, I needed to express my ideas through an active rather than a static medium.
During the performance of It’s not a bit like The Walton’s…, the artist is seen sitting amongst various domestic items and crib components. Instructions, a template for what the crib should look like when completed and how it should be built is close at hand. As she begins to assemble the various parts it soon becomes obvious that there are items missing and that she must find substitutes or improvise new ways of making connections. Several times the construction falls apart and she must start again. Finally, she has a stable crib of sorts. Gently checking that the structure is more or less stable, she sits back, content until the moment when it will be necessary to begin again or make repairs or replace a fraying element.
An interesting and important quality of performance is the difficulty of repeating the same action in an identical manner to arrive at an identical result. Each time a performance is given the end result will be something subtly or even markedly different, even though the performer begins with the same template and the same materials.
Just like families.
