Last time I wrote here, I mentioned feeling pleased that I no longer had to pay for expensive storage space – I’d managed successfully, to fit everything that wasn’t needed in my studio into my garden shed. Money aside, commercial spaces clearly have their upside, however – ie. they’re watertight and don’t let the rain in! Cut to, what happened in the garden shed …
Prior to this recent heatwave, it’s been an exceptionally wet few months – the wettest May on record for decades, in fact. The shed roof hadn’t held up to not letting the rain in and one storage box in particular, was completely water logged.
I threw away everything that wasn’t salvageable – wads of paper, collected from vintage magazines over many years – newspaper cuttings, extracts from Mills & Boon books and so on, all drenched in rainwater, congealed and stuck together. Nothing could be rescued and until I found it in this state, I’d forgotten how precious the things in this particular box were. It was hard to come to terms with and for the first time ever, I shed tears over the loss of material things.
I’ve been quite philosophical about things getting broken/spoiled in the past but that’s probably because of the sheer amount of stuff I had – you can’t miss what you didn’t know you had, after all. But after years of sifting and sorting and shedding and reducing stuff, what I do have in my collections has become more precious. I know more now about what’s in the boxes and consequently, I’m more emotionally attached, more intimately connected to the objects and paraphernalia. Rather than a huge, random collection of things, I’m now looking at objects that have been carefully selected – the things I really like and more importantly, things that I see as having potential for creating new work. I was excited by a lot of the finds in a recent dive into the archive – the box containing the lamb related stuff, a case in point.
It’s hugely ironic that, in this particular case, the collections were based around the theme of ‘Poor Lamb.‘ There were some iconic images – kept for years and some going as far back as 1989 when I lived in the States. Women portrayed as ‘victims ‘ has always been a theme of interest to me and I’d drawn together many images of the various ways in which the subject could be represented. I find the word victim problematic, particularly used in the context of women, and I was looking forward to investigating it further via the assorted paraphernalia I’d collected. The presentation of women portrayed in 1950/60s magazines seemed to primarily focus on their vulnerability and powerlessness; their weakness and fragility – ‘poor lambs.’ But that’s a whole other blog post …
ruined: reduced to a state of decay, collapse, or disintegration
having been irreparably damaged or harmed
Items ‘ruined’ in another box included four sewing box lids which I’d collected for their beautiful colours and satin textures, all of them conjuring up memories of my late Nana’s wicker sewing box. I’d planned to use them as part of an ongoing body of work, ‘Nana’s Colours’ but – saturated with rain water, the original colours had totally changed and the mould that had grown, formed a film of grey over the original satin fabric. In spite of my initial disappointment at finding them in this state, something stopped me throwing them straight in the bin – there was ‘something’ about them and so, I put them to one side. And when the sun came out, I put them out in the garden to dry.
There was a defining moment when I caught a glimpse of them on the lawn and realised that things I’d thought were potentially ruined, were in fact, rather beautiful. The sewing box lids summed up the ‘beauty in decay’ principle perfectly and when I sent photos to a couple of close friends and artists who confirmed my gut feelings about them, I knew something special had come out of the leak in the shed – I’d held onto them for a reason and I’m so glad I did. I took them to my studio the next day and propped them up on a shelf in the gallery space. Giving them space transformed them and I knew for certain at that point that I’d hold onto them – the water damage had given them a new layer of preciousness.
But that’s luck – I know it won’t always turn out this way and I’m taking no chances. I took action almost immediately to retrieve stuff that isn’t waterproof from the shed and it’s already taken me several days, with more to do. The long term solution of course, is to get the current shed completely sealed and waterproofed. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the process of reacquainting myself with objects that have been packed away, out of sight for many months. I’m getting to a point where I have virtually every single object listed and while I’m proud of that achievement, I’d still love to have these things at hand. It’s a tight fit in the garden shed and a lot of physical work’s required to access things. I should probably give up on it, but I still fantasise about having a studio that would provide sufficient space to accommodate all 100+ 30 litre boxes as well as space to work in …
