memory_work - Mirabilia Domestica - The Textile Self Re/collected

Memory Work
2005
60cm x 42cm x 3cm

Description
Collection of photographic, textile and text objects presented in the format of an album

Large, soft, heavy, bulky album, pale pink ribbons

Front cover layered, stitched and felted collage of colour photographs on packaging felt that gives weight and support to the cover fabric, a waste product made from shredded clothes matted together. This non-woven fabric is normally used for padding or wrapping large and heavy electrical items for protection during transport. Linen back cover.

Three white textile objects in back pocket:

- a vest of my mother Gertrud (1919 - 2004), Perlon, late 1950s
- an Italian ‘ciripa’, ribbed cotton baby’s nappy, 1970s, more recently used as duster, donated with a story
- a lace doily from a family collection, hand felted

Themes, comments & storylines

The washing l ine as a connective device and memory metaphor

“These were the traditional Italian ciripà which are not used anymore but I’m talking of the 70s. A ciripà was a strip of ribbed cotton about a metre long and 20 cm wide with side ribbons. You folded in half lengthwise on the table and placed the baby on the wider end and passed the double strip through the baby’s legs, then tied the ribbons round the baby’s tummy, like a parcel. It was, in my opinion, very impractical as they leaked straight away. I learned to pad them out with torn towels. Disposable nappies - Pampers - were just coming in but they were very expensive and made my babies bottoms sore. At one point all three kids were in nappies!!! As I am writing I can feel the soft spread of the ribbing and smooth baby skin. On the washing line they fluttered like banners. When that was over I kept them and there are still some in the village house under the stairs which are used as dusters. As I am writing I can feel the soft spread of the ribbing and smooth baby skin. On the washing line they fluttered like banners. When that was over I kept them and there are still some in the village house under the stairs which are used as dusters.” (my correspondence)

“My mother spreading my brother's newly washed toweling nappies on the top of the snow to bleach/ whiten in the bright weather. They were not there the next morning and I thought that they had "dissolved" in the snow.” BBC Radio 4 Memory Experience 2006

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither'. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, 1977, p. 49

"Jakob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend's home on the washday. They should not have arrived anywhere, certainly not at this great house, the largest but two in Weissenfeld, at such a time. Dietmahler's own mother supervised the washing three times a year, therefore the household had linen and white underwear for four months only. He himself possessed eighty-nine shirts, no more. But here, at the Hardenberghaus in Klostergasse, he could tell from the great dingy snowfalls of sheets, pillowcases, bolstercases, vests, bodices, drawers, from the upper windows into the courtyard, where grave-looking servants, both men and women, were receiving them into giant baskets, that they washed only once a year. This might not mean wealth, in fact he knew that in this case it didn't, but it was certainly an indication of long standing. A numerous family, also. The underwear of children and young persons, as well as the larger sizes, fluttered through the blue air, as though the children themselves had taken to flight."

'Fritz, I'm afraid you have brought me here at an inconvenient moment. You should have let me know. Here I am, a stranger to your honoured family, kneep deep in your smallclothes.'"

Penelope Fitzgerald (1996), The Blue Flower, Flamingo, London 1996, p.1

“A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung. You may string words together without a sentence sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeve and stretch them without a clothes line between two trees, but - it is bad for the clothes.”

Robert Frost, Letter to J.T.Bartlett, in Selected Letters