Following on from the previous blog entry I wanted to write about why I am resurrecting an idea for a piece from 1994.
Christmas 2014: I went to Germany to what was meant to be a family reunion and that turned out to be, instead, a “season in hell”, followed by a final, liberating rupture between myself and my Mother. Our relationship, in it’s dysfunctional miserable glory has been a constant source of inspiration in my work. After seventeen days with her over Christmas and New Year, where she brought me and my girls to tears on numerous occasions, she told us to never come back. That she never wanted us in her life again. It may seem perverse but that was the best Christmas present she could have given me. Over the years I have tried to protect myself from her vicious verbal assaults on every aspect of my character but it took her “laying into” my daughters that made me realise that only by withdrawing from the situation completely and permanently and facing the fact that my family consisted of solely my girls and me, that I could move forward with my life.
So, to much relief we came back to our life in England, where everything seemed warm and welcoming and precious. And we snuggled up and watched our usual DVDs: mainly David Attenborough, some “Wonders of the Universe” and yet more Nature documentaries. And it was there that I saw the striking imagery, again, of a dragonfly emerging out of its chrysalis. And the violent triumph of its breakthrough into a new life resonated with me and mingled with my feelings of anger and grief.
And I thought about “Angel’s Nightie”, about a chrysalis-body bag, that I had once wanted to make. And I felt that it was time to begin.
How wonderful to give birth to oneself; to finally cut the umbilical-apron-strings of being born of a Mother into a physical body, and move through transformation into another state beyond the purely physical/biological.
Angels as human butterflies/dragonflies. The light at the end of a tunnel.
