Stairways to Heaven
17cm x 8cm x 6cm
Description
Scent bottle, round steel pin tin, plastic figure of Virgin Mary, miniature stack of folded linen, miniature wash board
Themes, comments & storylines
A little shrine, sister piece to Kohinoor
Dedicated to the Goddess of cleanliness - Homage to the laundress
“In the summer she looked after the orchard, in the winter she wove linen. She took orders from my mother to make table cloths for our inheritance, joining the woven fabric with white crochet and embroidering it with white patterns. She herself always wore black. I remember the tales of the young girls sowing, harvesting, threshing, carding and spinning the flax, then going to weaving school. The more diligent and skillful they were, and the more girls there were on the farm to get the essential housework done quickly and efficiently, the more time they had to weave, embroider and crochet beautiful things for their trousseau. Their application was to be my example, and all my life I have tried to live up to it: in the household, the garden, the farm and later in my job. The fabrics proudly display the initials of the hard-working women of my family. Many of these fabrics are now in my linen cupboard. I look at them regularly, take delight in the weave and the embroidery, stroke them, use them, wash and iron them, telling my daughters their story and fold them up again. They are the inheritance of my family’s women’s work, the living traces of dead women, of their life time when they were young or old. [...]
For me, too, the linen is sacrosanct. I care for it the way I learned to as the eldest daughter and consider it my duty to look after it. When my mother died I made sure everybody got their fair share. We also inherited rolls of hand woven linen not yet made up. I made curtains from it and will continue to use it.”
(from my correspondence)
"A sheet. This a pure linen sheet. My grandmother brought sheets from Scotland when she first came to Australia in 1919. They were big queen size sheets that had been given to her mother for a wedding present in the 1880’s. This sheet had been cut in half and turned when the middle became worn then when that happened again it was cut into a single sheet and hemmed. Most people in the family had one at some time. They were hard and white and cold when you got into bed.
The sheets remind me of my childhood, getting into bed on a hot night and feeling the coolness of the sheet and in winter taking a hot water bottle to bed to try and get warm. It also reminds me of my grandmother who I loved very much.
I like to use things everyday and not keep them put away somewhere for special. For me every day is special. I use things until they wear out."
From my correspondence (28, 2008)
"Mi trabajo consistía especialmente en mantener la ropa de la casa, una faena dura que tenía como única ventaja la de dejar la mente libre para volar y sonar e inventar tiempos mejores…[…] Trabajaba en tandas de tres días. El primero escogía la ropa y dejaba en remojo la más sucia mientras iba frotando el montón entero para quitarle las manchas. Al día siguiente ya podría lavarla con jabón, aclararla, hervirla y torcerla antes de tenderla a secar al sol de mediodía, procurando reservar los lugares más luminosas para la apreciada ropa blanca. Sólo al tercer día sería momento de recogerla y alimentar el fuego para pasarle cuidadosamente la plancha. Luego, bien doblado, iba a los armarios. Si tienes en cuenta que en la casa había cuatro niños (el quinto venía en camino), además el padre y la madre, mis amos, y la abuela maternal junto a una hija suya soltera, la cocinera y Serafín, el chico que ayudaba al amo, ya te figurarás que trabajo no me faltaba.”
Teresa Moure (2008), Hierba mora, Delbolsillo, Barcelona, p.145, 146
[“My work consisted especially in taking care of the laundry in the house, a hard task whose only advantage was that it left the mind free to fly and dream of the past and invent the future… […] I worked in a three-day rhythm. On the first I gathered the washing and left the dirtiest to soak while rubbing the whole pile to remove all the stains. The following day I was ready to wash everything with soap, rinse, boil and wring it before hanging it out to dry in the midday sun, making sure to keep the sunniest spots for the esteemed white linen. Only on the third day the time had come to bring it all in, to stoke up the fire and carefully iron it all. Then, neatly folded, it went into the cupboards. If you keep in mind that there were four children (and a fifth on the way), apart from the father and mother, my masters, and the maternal grandmother with her unmarried daughter, the cook and Serafin, the boy who helped the master, you can imagine that I wasn’t short of work.” [my translation]
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