The work for the collaboration with the Level 5 English Students which is due to be exhibited in May is now complete. I had to modify ‘Best Friends’ because I misread the essay at the start (by reading it too quickly) and misinterpreting it which was slightly embarrassing (and funny) I am unable to divulge the content but I found a satisfactory way around it and here is the result.
Picking up again on my main theme I am developing an idea from looking at the website of the Foundling Museum in London. Mothers of abandoned babies would often leave small objects with their babies as a means of identification should they ever return to the Foundling Hospital to claim their child, sometimes they had tied tiny scraps of cloth to the baby.
I bought a pack of miniature plastic babies and knitted tiny blankets for each (crochet).
So far I have knitted eight in white and one in pink to represent the nine months of labour, the pink one represents a baby girl singled out for adoption.
This painting which was exhibited at the Foundling Museum entitled ‘The Fallen Woman’ (Sept 2015 – January 2016).
‘The Outcast’ by Richard Redgrave (1851)
In this painting ‘a stern patriarch evicts his daughter and her illegitimate baby into literal cold, for snow falls beyond the threshold. A brother buries his head to weep while various sisters cry and plead with their father, but to no avail. On the floor there lies what appears to be an incriminating letter, and on the wall hangs a didactic print which seemingly reinforce the drama, perhaps that of Abraham casting out Hagar and Ishamael, or Christ and the woman taken in adultery.’
Redgrave’s painting of this popular Victorian subject, which in the twentieth century came to embody a heartless and puritanical Victorian attitude toward sexuality…’ George P Landow
http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/redgrave/paintings/4.html
I am sending for another pack of babies as I thought of another idea for them. Remember one of the many Forrest Gump quotes? ‘My mamma always said life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get’.
I was given a box of chocolates at Christmastime which reminded me of the adoption triangle…more on this another time.
