Unspeakable Memories
Summer 2004
35cm x 30cm x 25cm
Description
A puppet without strings, grey and bedraggled, in a doll’s deckchair, the face hidden behind a mask, feet resting on a 1945 diary.
Themes, comments & storylines
Family secrets, secrets of the past, imagined, feared, unknown – unasked questions, refused answers, uncertainties, skeletons in cupboards. Hiding behind appearances and conventions, behind frailty, behind age, behind childhood experience. Unwillingness or inability to speak?
There is a photograph of me playing with my doll and the deckchair in the backyard of our house. The image is grey and fuzzy, out of focus. It brings back memories of loneliness, not being allowed to play with the neighbour’s children, being made to feel different. I am wearing a woollen hat knitted by my mother that I did not like – it was itchy. I resented my mother and what she stood for even then, long before I learned about the past and began wondering what role my parents might have played in it.
"An individual patch in the impalpable material of that shroud."
Semprun, Jorge (1964), The long voyage, Grove Press New York, p.120
Packing
"Clothing lie loosely;
Limbless; one on top of the other
In a mass grave of odour and expired life.
Scorned,
Each fabric is unfurled and checked -
A prerequisite of this autopsy.
And not until each garment is laid out
And pieced together and finally boxed
Will the process of grieving begin."
Shiloh Harmitt
(Bristol City Museum and Gallery:
display in 'Making Sense - A Rwandan story'
6.9. - 23.11.2003