Resting Places
2004/2005
38cm x 29cm x 8cm

Description
Photographs of death in handmade paper album inside cardboard cover. Front and inner album covered with fabric made from leaves and woven grass which since its making has slowly continued to decay – getting brittle, disintegrating, fading. 

A black handkerchief, three reels of black thread, a ribbon ‘in memoriam’, a pair of scissors.

Images of family and unknown graves, dead soldiers and funerals – ribbons & flowers.

Themes, comments & storylines
The Three Fates Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos spinning, drawing out and cutting the thread of life

Mortality and fragility. The lightness of being. Shrouds. The passing of time.

Childhood memories of visits with my grandmother to the vast and mysterious woodland cemetery. I had never known the people whose graves she tended; my aunt and grandfather died before I was born. I remember her hanging up her coat on a nail in a tree before she got started.


“Textiles begin to deteriorate from the moment they are made.”

Harris, Jennifer (ed) (1993), 5000 Years of Textiles, British Museum Press, London 1993, p.8