At work yesterday I had just been speaking with a doctor about re-hanging and complementing the artworks in the eye department of the city hospital when my manager AB called me. He was also at the hospital and invited me to join him looking for shelves in a clinic that was empty and awaiting refurbishment.
I was leaving a room when a small box caught my eye – it was on a shelf that wasn’t the kind that we were looking for. I took the box down – it was obviously old … a very particular shade of green … it was small and sat comfortably on the palm of my hand. Walking to the next room I flipped the two metal clasps open and lifted the lid. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking at – a pair of ’jewel’ decorated things … hair decorations?
AB took a photo and did an image search … it turns out that they are a pair of (potentially) 18th century shoe buckles. We had been told that we could take anything we wanted from the rooms so, along with some shelves that we subsequently found, the shoe buckles came with us.
Back at the office I typed ’shoe buckle’ into google and the first thing that came up was the children’s rhyme One two buckle my shoe …. I got a cold shiver – Elena’s most recent work is called Five six pick up sticks … a continuation of the same rhyme. What a very odd coincidence … what a correspondence!
I finished work and immediately called Elena. It was the second odd coincidence that she had heard that day. An artist friend and collaborator of hers has just found out that a rare and expensive medicine that she has been prescribed for years (after much toing and froing with the NHS) is derived from a particular sub-set of the same marine species that she was been researching – her PhD project. She has had no idea about this but her subject has literally been in her blood for year! A far greater coincidence than my shoe buckles … really makes me wonder about why we are drawn to particular themes and subjects … and how we should follow our instincts even when we can’t explain or rationalise why we are doing something. Sometimes there are other things at work … things that we, as artists, need to embrace without recourse to logic or reason. This seems a truly timely reminder for me as I continue to turn over the material that I am gathering inspired by Eugène Jansson’s 1907 appearance in Uppsala.
In the meantime my mind is full of questions about shoe buckles …
