Ada's glove box
28cm x 10cm x 6 cm
Description
Expandable glove box, glove stretcher (bone, ivory?), leather gloves. Donation.
Themes, comments & storylines
This is the sister piece to Ada's handkerchief box.
White Gloves
"There's a pair of white gloves that live in my memory. I can see them now, lying on top of some old clarinets in the cramped, dusty attic of my grandmother's house […] Nearby is a clarinet case with a cracked skin. The case itself is open, and you can smell the must in its lining. Everything in the memory is gray […] Although I see the gloves only in memory - I have never done so in actuality - I know they are spotlessly white.
The gloves became part of my memory nearly a decade ago, during a turning point in my life […] The gloves were only a detail in my father's story, but for some reason they spoke to me, and I felt a great release of emotion when, in my mind, I put them on. They seemed to cleanse me of guilt and confirm a path, seemed to connect me to a mythical ancestor who sacrificed himself for me. There was life in them, my grandfather's life […].
I am still amazed at my reaction to the white gloves, still in awe of the power the image has today […].Back then the gloves confirmed a decision to go through with a divorce, to choose life over a deadening sense of responsibility. They connected me with a kindred spirit, a resource I never knew existed in my family […]. Ultimately, I put the gloves on because they fit. No one else in the family has fingers like mine. No one else has the same temperament.
[…] Often the gloves have returned with their whiteness to ease the guilt over choices I have made and help me cope with the small deaths that permit life. I have to separate from people […] to pursue my soul. The gloves make my hands clean and tell me what to do: start fresh, stick to the soul, get going. It's been eighty years since my grandfather put the white gloves aside. If only he knew how much they have mattered today!" (Kotre 1996:1-5)
Kotre, John (1995), White Gloves: How we create ourselves through memory, New York, Free Press