My mother's pubic hair

I went out to dinner with friends on saturday evening and the conversation turned - as it does - to sexual obsessions and fetishes. In particular a man recently arrested for collecting pubic hair from the travel luggage of women flying business or first class. An interesting fetish!

'I had one of my mother's pubic hairs for a long time.' I entered the conversation casually, I thought.But no!

This disclosure of mine required explaining.

When my mother died my sisters and I spent the afternoon sitting on her bed and clearing through her personal possessions. it was an interesting experience, things she had collected and hoarded that made no sense to us. I have a champagne cork dated and kept - marked with several exclamation marks and nothing else. A gold dip pen nib, heavily engraved but also anonymous.

In many ways I love that she kept things but felt no need to elaborate - proof that she kept them for herself only, I believe and love about her!

She had a very small collection of antique silk french knickers and I took these. I remember her buying each pair and her delight in such sensual, delicious under garments in an age when most people wore sensible cotton. These were sheer and draped, without seams or labels!

When I returned home I took them up to my bedroom. It was my intention to have them folded and tucked into my knicker drawer - a tiny reminder I would see each morning and so I sat on my bed to fold them.

It was at this time I found my mother's pubic hair caught in the silk mesh of cream fabric and for some reason I removed it and looked at it.

I remember that moment clearly. I was looking at a most intimate visual of my dead mother and I cried cried at my loss, her beauty and charm and her delight in her french knickers! I put the hair carefully in the locket she had given me and revisited it from time to time.

It stayed there for a long time - until my toddler daughter began exploring my things and pulled out all my jewelry to play with. The hair disappeared  - gone forever and I said goodbye to it in tears on my bed  - it was my last link with my dead mother!!

Artist statement - works for writing as well as collage!

I woke up!

I had slept a life time and in those days, those weeks of sleeping my mind constructed its own dreamtime. A burst cerebral aneurysm ripped through my life and transformed everything. I lost my connection to the now and moved into the deep. I lost myself in those days of sleeping and remembered nothing of before or now. In that place of forgetting, of unknowing I connected with our shared history, our shared consciousness and began to dream.

In awakening I began to translate my dreams into images. Mythologies pulled from the shared mind through pain and death into a sense of the personal.

I use the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life to recreate these metaphors of image. Layers of memory and understanding through the use of materials - the metaphors I create exist on several levels and ache to be transmogrified into form

The common need to find the human form intrigues me. Irrespective of the disparate nature of the materials available we have a desire to construct the human form. In my work I wish to push this thought: – how abstract must the form become before we no longer find the human within it?

Unsure if these figures are icons, fetishes or goddesses I listened for their voices and allowed their presence to construct themselves.

I found a photo

I found a photo 

of my son aged around 6 years.hes wearing big furry slippers, black leggings and a long sleeved black tee shirt. his hair is spiked with gell and he's smiling that beautiful unselfconscious smile young children have.

my heart leapt when I looked at this image and then just as instantly broke.

that baby boy has gone - encorporated now in the engaging 23 year old young man he has become.

I love my son - love him dearly but I miss and mourn that enchanting child who exists now only in my memory.

is that why we love becoming grandparents??


((ps I just realised my daughter will most likely read this and will sniff and look at me with those clear blue eyes of her. the unspoken demand - where am I in this?? and my reply to her....

The image I have in my heart of you, my Love, is lying on your back on the small raised lawn outside the musuem; making stars with your outstretched arms and legs. You were conscious of nothing but the joy of your moment and the blue of the sky. I love you!!))