It’s been a strange time processing grief and the end of an era. My father died (peacefully just before he was 92) in December, and with the processing of that has come the simultaneous challenge of losing the house I was born in. This piece of work aims to consider the life and meaning of things as well as the beauty, fragility and transience of the beating heart life (both human and of our natural world) .
About 5 years ago my parents came to lunch. My father was delighted with his offering - a dead siskin he had found in his garden. It was beautiful and tragic- perfect and yet ‘over’. I photographed it and we buried it in my garden, and pondered on its short life. It was typical of him - he delighted in nature and spent a lifetime watching and marvelling at birds, but I too knew that it was an important gift and I would at some stage respond to the offering.
A month ago, I inherited a standard lamp with a yellow silk shade that had in turn been inherited by my parents. It had never been wired to work in England (it came from Austria, my step grandfather’s family) so I decided to rewire it and recover the shade to give it a life and place to be in a new space. Who would remember the lamp, the house, the bird, us?
The work is a musing on these things - using the yellow silk shade from the original lamp and the image of the siskin (now free) to create a new permanent house for these thoughts.
The intention is to eventually use all the pieces of the shade, and the brading in some way ……. all in progress.
