I’m back although mentally still suspended between two languages and two places – arriving is hard work! Spent lovely, affectionate days with family and friends, feasted on Anatolian garlic soup, Hungarian goulash and too many sweets, sipped sparkling wines and strong coffees, read a mystery for diversion and a novel to bind me in the world, was wheelchair-whizzed through an exhibition until my grin couldn’t keep me upright any longer, bought a catalogue that I can hardly carry, dreamed of museum-sleepovers and waking amongst pieces that I’d get to know slowly, like new friends, and when I lay on the sofa at my mom’s house like a fossilized pretzel I filled spaces with my own work, real and imagined.
Being back at one’s childhood home is a strange kind of dislocation – halfway in, halfway out, the territory familiar, fraught, and alien. Is the past ever as present as where we come from? For a sense of continuity and connection I took LR’s boy with me who was received with interest and questions and whose one-armed siblings lie curled up in the coils of my brain. Temperatures felt more like early spring – disorienting – has the new year really started? It seems so:
Happy New Year to you all! Glad to be posting again.
LR’s girl (2012)
Materials: hand-me-down wool/polyester mixture
Dimensions: 41 cm x 31 cm
LR’s boy (2012)
Materials: hand-me-down wool/polyester mixture
Dimensions: jumper 29 cm x 15 cm, pants 16 cm x 13 cm
