Old Queen Victoria rests well in the palm of a hand. Her coppered head veiled, held by a diadem, raised, rubbed, her regal chins jiggling in pockets and stacked in purses. She lies layered amongst her heirs in till drawers and counting bags.  Cheek to cheek, cheek to jowl with her younger impressions. Staring ahead to avoid odious comparisons with her grandchildren. For a while the crossover currency from grandparents, parents to child. A time travelling disc, transferring, in low relief, the entity of Empire. 

I collect these pennies, keeping them for a while in a small jar with a black plastic lid decorated with a red and yellow Chinese dragon. Shopping is local and our small village Square has all the shops we need for basics. We have a Mace supermarket manned by women cashiers. They keep back the Victorian pennies for me, making sure I am given them in the change, matriarchal exchanges. 

In the Square the butcher is a man, the sweetshop owner is a woman, the post office owner is a woman, and the newsagent owner is a woman, the two pubs and hardware store are run by men and their wives, the bakery shop staff are women, the baker is a man. The vicar is a man. Those serving the public wear tabards, overalls, suits, aprons, collars, ties. All have a physical barrier, as a prop, waist line height. Counters, pulpits, bar tops, glass cabinets, displays. Chests, bosoms, elbows, fingers, palms, all in my eyeline. These people are strange and performative. I cannot imagine them in houses or passing them on the street. Some scare me with barks and growls or mysteriously sing when I enter the shop. They do not have a face value, I cannot read their profiles, their context or histories. I acquire my coins  mostly by luck, not often by patronage, kindness or in wonderment of a child Victorian coin collector. Size and maturity equates to worth. The average age of a coin collector is sixty years old and probably male. 

There is shop that sells a penny tray of sweets covered with a tea towel. Loose sherbet comes in paper twists. There is ham on the bone, tins and dairy food. A surfeit of  gingham strung on white plastic covered wire, hooked and drooped.  This shop won’t survive much longer, it exists due to tradition. The owner is a growler, being a mid-twentieth century child I owe her no loyalty and she does not proffer a single penny.

My grandmother has a Victorian silver florin, found in the grass at a cricket match. She married twice, the second husband waits until the first dies. Born in 1900, she grows up as an Edwardian and still likes to wear a collar and ribbon. Her father is a vicar, her brother serves in the tank regiment in the First World War, is mentioned in dispatches, receives a Military Cross and drowns himself in a water butt. Her sister has chestnut red hair and I am told it is a shame we do not inherit that gene. She gives me the florin which is put in the jar with the Chinese dragon decorated lid. Eventually I lose it, it was safer in the long grass, away from the mercurial hobbies of children. 

In those early days of commerce transferring to supermarkets, I shop with my mother and observe the choreography of give and take, the etiquette of what is served and what is self-service from shelves, value and theft being balanced. Some goods are delivered. This is reserved for milk, bread, fish, meat and a large grocery delivery that is ordered weekly by telephone. Bills are accrued and payment promised. The balance and change carried up and down the road from my house. Travelling pennies, Victoria’s profile stamped impassive and imperious of the rurality of her destination. We eat fresh food, some  from  the produce and fish markets in the town. Certain foods need the status of big displays and a hereditary lineage of serfs, peasants, fish hawkers and cabin boys. It is women who shop with baskets and purses. Men keep shrapnel in their pockets and carry the quarry in an armpit.

To enter a shop alone as a mid-twentieth century child is as complex as a peace treaty. They are not friendly spaces. They have codes as mysterious as going unarmed into the lair of a wild animal,  challenged to fight in a duel, ordered to dance a minuet, negotiate a house sale, perform a ritual of gift exchanges in a foreign land and language, show deference and anticipate nervously a change in the rules of queuing, dependent on who is serving you today, who is behind you, who your parents are, the size of your house, your friendships, your religion, which pub your parents frequents or do they frequent pubs, what you are wearing, how your hair is cut. The shopkeeper may as well point a gun, demand I do not pass the threshold and shoot me dead. 

We either walk or I am driven to the shops. I cannot remember ever being on a bus with a parent. Which is unfortunate as by far the most dangerous local adult money handler is the transient male single deck bus driver. Boundary beater, orbiter, sedentary badged and uniformed comrade with garrulous arms, circling prey hunter, random accelerator, brake and door operative, pale ale and Golden Virginia musk, incandescent at the bearer of notes or passes, any currency, regardless of royal jowls, held in small hands. Hater of school uniforms that include a Panama hat but shifts at the sight of white socks, bidding, biding, passive stalker, no eye contact, eyeline fixed on torsos, hips, puberty. Trickster, herder, bully, bus

station Inspector and Commandant. I hate them. They plague my life until I learn to drive. They would barter my virginity for a Victorian penny.

Once past the check point there is the gauntlet of abusive and racist old women who sit together behind me and glare at the top of my head. They are probably the same age as one of my  coins, with the same  rubbed out profile and indistinguishable features, freshly minted in 1880s, children in the last cholera outbreak of 1892. Irritated by prolapses, facial hair, bad digestion caused by weakened immune systems in childhood they talk about television shows, The Black and White Minstrels and Hughie Green, mock anyone without a local dialect unless it is Received Pronunciation. They praise the colloquial, mundane and conformist. They have travelled in circles on this bus route as the vanguard, snipers shooting Murray Mints and Parma Violets, their purses are stuffed with small change, cat fur, budgie seed, pan and brush dust. 

I take two buses to school. One journey is with a bus pass that every driver disputes. The longer journey each way is one penny and a sixpence. A travelling Queen Victoria occasionally mixes herself into the change, accompanying with me until she is confined to the jar. I snare and jail the currency of the patriarchal Empirical code of conduct, curtailing her tour of the Shires. 

Who handles these pennies before me, born nearly sixty years after Victoria died? How far have the pennies travelled, beyond and  around the bigger town a mile from my house, up the road to  the village Square, into tills, pockets, purses, jars? Is the journey from The Royal Mint the longest they have ever travelled? The most rubbed coin with a barely defined date of 1885 is in circulation before the last local cholera outbreak in 1892 when less lives are lost than in the three outbreaks of 1833, 1849 and 1866. The men from London descend on the town and village after the 1849 epidemic, describe the filth, slums and poverty for the 1854 Sanitation Report. By 1892 patience is lost and the urban and rural district council are ordered to stop using, and allowing the residents to use, the natural springs as sewers or dumping sewage in pot holes euphemistically described as cess pits. My home town is literally a shit hole and the residents disenfranchised shit stirrers.

That poverty still hangs in the miasma of the Square, Fat Annie who lives in a house without indoor sanitation. The tin bath still left hanging by the outside toilet in the back yard of the house my grandmother moves into in the early 1960s, requiring a grant to put in an inside bathroom. I am accosted by a tiny old woman by the church entrance  of the Norman church, who tells me she plays the mandolin at night and had lived all her life with her father until his death. It is early evening and she is a spectre from a different world. When I remember her she is wearing a bonnet but it is only the gravestones throwing their shade and the strangeness of the graveyard at dusk, the family plots of infant mortality, puerperal infection, diseases of poverty, ignorance and neglect, shrouded that evening in the garments of MR James, Dickens, Alan Garner and Leon Garfield. The jangle of silver pennies stamped with  fleury kings. There is a pinched lane at the bottom of the park that overlooks the graveyard, at one end the vicarage and at the opposite end the workhouse. Both functions lost to the community and the buildings converted for different uses, no longer a village dependent on offertory and charity when one Victorian penny bought a loaf of bread or a quart of beer and a pauper’s grave left no memorial. 

I scour the pavements for lost change to buy Toffets. The Adventures of Robin Hood  begins so I leave the ancient yew lined path and walk up the hill past the houses with their medieval foundations and nylon net curtains. The monochrome lights from televisions wink and tremble. 

My parents collect antiques to mix up with their mid-twentieth century art and furniture, tasteful and eclectic. The sitting room at home changes regularly  like a theatre set. My mildly eccentric collection is tolerated. I am given special coin display books to keep them safe and give them status. There is a subliminal pressure to complete the collection. Special books means I am not a random individual coin collector and I merge into a community with a name – numismatists.  I can be queried about pennies, asked to show the books, quizzed about gaps and values. I need to acquire knowledge I don’t care about.  I am a child. It is the images of Victoria I love, the ribbons in her hair on the earlier coins, the way they fly and the little laurel leaves in her hair. On later coins, her veiled head like a churchyard memorial, drop earrings and a jewelled bosom, adornments signifying grief and intransigence, her face blank. Over time the blank gets blanker, the past smeared and receding, her punched face disappearing under the pressure of swapping. Swapped eventually to the power of ten. 

In our Edwardian house my husband and I reduce the diversity of possessions we have accumulated over many years. Out goes brown furniture, other collections I brought from childhood including Victorian glass perfume bottles. I keep my favourite children’s books, every poem I wrote from approximately age nine, letters from dead relatives or lost friends that permeate with nostalgia, any containing accusations, false truths, absolute lies or incidents not worth the re-reading  are thrown out. The one remaining Victorian penny display book is emptied of the few remaining coins. I put them in the last piece of brown furniture, a glass fronted cabinet loved by travelling collectors.  I now shop anonymously in supermarkets in other towns. I drive and do not have to catch a bus. My transactions are contactless. Once coins have been conjured up as the bearer of Covid, as miasma was once thought to carry cholera, it is easy to lose all contact. 

In the town, in other collections, there are Roman coins, offertories in a Neolithic cave. Julius Caesars’ coins are minted with a laurel crown as are King George Third coins lost on the cliffs of Napoleonic forts.  I excavate  my mother’s purse, lying in the dust of forty years. Inside is a 1971 new two penny piece and a bent 1976 new halfpenny. Queen Elizabeth Second wears her great grandmother’s  diadem. She has a look of the hairdressers about her, set and netted. I have an accompanying note book, a housewife’s Rosetta stone, full of shopping lists that seem to have been written in random years, not chronologically and not always in her handwriting. Someone else scribes, someone else shops and my mother dies. 

I am not collecting coins. I am collecting faces and portraits. Adornments and flora. Blanks, punches, dies, profiles. People memorialised. The patina of the past pressed into palms. I cannot remember the face of the sweet old lady in the graveyard. I know she held my gaze, her want of recognition at the edge of the deep well of nemeses. She may have endured a childhood with contrary coachmen. I had left her for a quest for Toffets and the film star looks of Richard Greene. The one living person who could have willingly filled in the blanks. 

Art is not always about pretty things.

It’s about who we are, what happened to us, and

how our lives are affected.

– Elizabeth Brown

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How a female artist’s art school notes are obscured by motherhood in the 1970s

‘Our Generation’ is the subtext of my work, women artists of the 1970s reclaiming our place in popular culture.

I am preparing another theme for Our Generation and I create scrapbooks of my adolescence and the culture of the 1970s. Having trawled through the chronology of family photographs I look at the work I made from the sixties to the seventies, poems stuffed into carrier bags and artwork lying in portfolios.

Inside art school note books and sketch pads, in the margins, I see doodles, scribbles, sketches, prose, essays, aspirations, chronicles, valedictory huff and puff, drawings of the ‘perfect’ eye, boys’ names, plans, rescues, defeats. I can see subliminal messages to the future, look what you were, became, are, and how you became you. The notes are written sitting next to a friend, a student, a tutor, in a class, in a kitchen, a bedroom, on the bus, in front of the television. Every mark a declaration and record of ‘our time is now. On the cover of one notebook I write twice ‘Dada is foolish. A public execution of false morality’. I scribble my name seven times.

The design project I concentrate on and struggle with are illustrations for a children’s book. The notebooks show how I’m desperately working out how I have boxed myself into a 20th century female trope – illustrating children’s books. I am not interested in this art form at all (my male tutors know this too but cannot break out of their own tropes).

The irony is not lost on me that the notebooks later became gendered children’s books in themselves, pages of shopping lists, Christmas present lists, illustrations of 20th century convention and tradition. Teaching my child to draw cats, dogs, hands and the nuclear family. Ambition now channelling recycled inspiration.

I’m looking at portraits of mothers holding children. Julia Stephens, Bernadine Coverly, Mabel Pryde, Jean Cook. When do we say our time is now? Then or only now and then. The notebooks of the 1970s tell me to look at what I was, became, are, and how I became me. How do I know when I have become and who tells me what I am. Have I been and gone? Was obscuring the 1973 to 1975 notes with my lists and doodles in my newly defined role as a mother leading me here or was I lost on the way?

New works for ‘Our Time is Now, Now and Then’ are on their way

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1971 – I was fourteen and we found a storage hut at school, next to the tennis court. We climbed in and nicked a few costumes. These were vintage clothes used for school plays.

I stole a little black cape with sequins on the shoulders that I remember wearing when I went with my mum to the fishmongers on the fish quay, no occasion too small to dress up.

A black satin blouse that was a bit tight but all the better for it.

A fudge coloured sleeveless knitted lace blouse, so old fashioned even my gran raised her eyebrows.

These finds inspired us to scuttle after school to the only charity shop in town back then.

We bought post war utility jackets, fitted satin suits, all hand made.

A pair of metal round sunglasses that were for someone with a serious problem with sunlight.

Tapestry sewing bags as handbags

Head scarves, once respectful now worn like a bohemian cultist.

Vintage Levi jeans hand-me downs. No zip, so big safety pins – proto punk in 1972. Soon dispensed with when going to the loo became a performance art in itself.

Old men’s overcoats.

Vintage fur jackets.

A black/grey fox stole with glass eyes

I had my ears pierced and hung a small gold locket from one, it was a memorial and contained an ancestor’s hair. My mum was bemused. I was starting to like ‘bemused’. I now had form for stealing, copying, creating new contexts. I created an avatar and inhabited it.

Now I celebrate that era of the nineteen seventies by referencing the objects, people, places and influences in my past including rock music, fashion, literature and popular culture. Works include taking iconic images of male poets, artists, rock stars and characters from children’s literature. They are reinterpreted as women and girls wearing iconic male rock star jackets, suits and clothes. Works also include paintings that represent ‘our generation’. This is the generation of women born in the 1950s and were adolescents in the 1970s

My works are figurative, narrative subjects. Researching family photos, traditional religious iconography, the representation of women in popular culture and the creativity of feminist women artists, works flip the male gaze and the submissive roles of my generation of women. I invent narratives with characters from my imagination. Paintings may start with a portrait but end as a stranger. These strangers gaze at you or past you but occupy the same space. 

As I became older I increasingly wanted a way to record the evolution of the essentiality of myself, besides wearing the clothes of the dead. Artists in pre war art schools had to reproduce the work of the ‘masters’ and my father’s art followed this tradition. It was displayed in our house, never quite his own, recognisable but wearing someone else’s clothes. After he died his art school folder gave me the goods. It reached back into the art establishment, pointed forward to his attempts to break free. His life drawings the most credible, the women he knew reinterpreted, drawn in charcoal. The drift of the charcoal sinking into their flesh. His letters, lists and ramshackle diaries, containing words and phrases beautiful in their isolation from context, gave me more treasure to absorb into new texts. In my poetry sometimes I layer his words with mine like vintage clothes. In my paintings I cut his art into snippets and tacked it onto my own, collaging a fabricated coalition between his years and mine. Heritage, DNA, dust. The pinning down and creating of these new works are a haunted world of my creation. A world relying on memories, unreliable narrators and the lost, now found, unwitting evidence, including his valedictory texts to a future he, nor I, would not inhabit. Amulets to protect me , not performances of necromancy to raise the dead.

My father was as complex as artists get. He was the loudest voice in the house, the mood creator, the pivot and the gibbet in one breathe. The sun and flood in one storm. He was tied by one foot to the past and ended up cutting off the rest of his body to escape his demons. He encouraged me without letting me win any race, women artists weren’t role models. He died when I was forty seven. I am now in my sixties. He may not be a ghost or resurrected but he is now in my image and he is interwoven, intertextually, in my work.

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My postcards included in Above and Below exhibition show photographs of me as a small child taken in Brixham. The original images were taken on Brixham Harbourside and Mansands Beach Brixham in the late 1950s and 1960s. I have collaged these photographs with images of classical gods and imagery. The landscape where we spent our childhood seems unchanged but it holds myth and legends that have migrated through the western world, changing our perception of our small world as we mature and understand the fragility of all we hold and love. As climate change increases idyllic childhoods, landscapes and our lives become like ‘Ozmandias of Egypt’ – ‘lone and level sands stretched far’

Becky Nuttall English Riviera UNESCO Global Ambassador Artist

The exhibition launches on 9th September 6 – 8pm at Artizan Gallery Fleet Street Torquay. It runs from September 10th – October 16th

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The tightly folded sheets

Compacted on dusty shelves,

Receptacles for mediocrity;

Love in an apron, tripe.

Factory clean and neat,

Woven in patterns to conform and blend.

Fashionable or traditional

all fit a type.

They must not clash or provoke discord in the night.

When making beds, technique is all,

Hospital corners and no rough stuff.

Do not let strangers in your bed,

Gratuitous self obsessors (wankers she means).

Only gentlemen, please, with one foot on the floor.

Let’s pretend it’s a draper shop,

the sheets sent billowing above our heads.

Dive, dive, duck, down.

Spin inside the windy cloth of candy stripes.

A multi colour haze of nausea,

dying without a sound.

Sometimes she steps in to stop the game,

sometimes she does not.

Lessons for good wives

Sheets are useful winding cloths,

they can bind sleep into death.

Marriage is the art of dying quietly

with little climaxes in between.

A little death and then a little sleep,

This is the advice my mother gave me,

repeatedly

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‘I am not a romantic‘ is a work on the theme of gender, identity, fashion, art, literature, popular culture, history and feminism

These are the images that influenced the work;

John Keats: The first Romantic poet I read when I was young. There was an element of trying to look clever, reading ‘high brow’ poetry – it would rub off on my aspiration to be taken seriously and not be thought of as merely a child. I found the imagery lovely but it was incredibly difficult to understand when you’re only about twelve years of age. Lately I became a bit obsessed with Regency carvates and the way they were tied. I felt the same with Lucien Freud’s tie, Kurt Schwitters suit and David Bowie’s jackets. Seventies androgynous fashion suited me and I also like to paint male Seventies fashion on females, especially female characters from children’s literature

Hair: I love a Twenties bob on a handsome face. Otto Dix’s portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden ( and the photograph of Sylvia) has influenced how I paint this style. Also Audrey Hepburn’s hair and Louise Brooks. I had a heavy fringe for many years, although not a bob.

Fashion: Of course, Biba. However in this picture I used a Biba print for the chair

Furniture: The chair is based on a chair in Charleston Sussex. I love Modernism and the colours used in the house are beautiful. I use yellow, red, blue and greys a lot in my work. I liked the idea of a female artist wearing Keats’ clothes, sitting on a Modernist chair with a Seventies Biba print, pretending not to be influenced by all the emotive imagery. I can’t discriminate the what, why and how I get my ideas.

Milton Head Pottery: I will incorporate the works produced by my dad’s pottery in the 1950s into my paintings to emphasis the heritage I come from. Mid twentieth century is also my favourite era, alongside Modernism.

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Doorways were a feature of this space. Caught in a corridor, I stood before the one for the studio and glanced at another; the guest room. Who are the guests of the artist when he is away from home; living in this flat away for the anchor and the source? Away from the summer lawns, replacing them with something, someone, people that held him hostage for weeks; anchored and weighed, adrift from the banal and paternal. I am today’s visitor and we do not speak of childish things. He has become a resident writer in another orbit and I have become his caller; although welcome, the space shifts and shapes around the presence of more preferred visitors; patrons, lodgers and paying guests; the bill payer, the emissary, the trigger, the executor; I only brought a doorway back to neglected summer lawns.

In the guest room a bed was made; I had arrived without luggage, I would not stay. I had found his art school folder, remembered some promises he made when I was young and when he made me laugh. I scan, cut, glue and paint our lives together, each of us guests in each other’s work; I weigh and anchor him back to me and women’s art.

The post The sin eaters first appeared on Becky Nuttall: Artist Poet.

Headbands, hot pants, long T shirts as dresses, roman sandals, platform heels, calico smocks, denim halter neck waistcoats, loons, oxford bags, chamois leather, afghan coats, jeans.

We were the Monkees; we were the next generation; I stopped being a believer

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Did you ever do something good as a child only to be told stuff like “you’ll get your reward in Heaven”? No thanks, especially if a nun is on reward duty; it will be slim pickings for the protestants that day; and I was an atheist so how did that work out in my favour? 

If you’re brought up by the offspring of conformist Edwardians and sent to a convent to be educated from the age of seven it is almost inevitable death is seen as some sort of reward. Any talent I had wasn’t rewarded at school, in my actual life. Did you suffer from the blatant favouritism of teachers when it came to comparing work? There was only room for one artist in the school, I did a bloody good painting of Doctor Dolittle to be usurped by the girl whose dad owned a garage; trade versus art and trade won the reward that day. Jesus was a carpenter after all. Our school was, like most of that era, an old house so the pictures and statues sat well in alcoves, walls and in the case of Saint Peter Chanel, the old kitchen; family portraits of merry burning hearts, weeping virgins, blonde beautiful Jesus practising the weary eye roll. Why we had The Rape of the Sabine Women on a classroom wall I don’t know; were they proto-Protestants? Religious lessons entailed explaining a completely abstract concept, that rejoiced in death, to children.  A particularly nasty lesson with the sole purpose to break any illusion we had that life was sweet. The only good life was one with random torments of censure, penance and dirges. We had our routine to negate the trauma as we emerged from the classroom ashen faced and shaky. We checked each other out for a while but, as children do, we let the present overwhelm us, immersing ourselves in our innocence; incorruptible, worthy of love. Comrades scorching the blighted crop of conformity; survivors regrouping in the playground; we were nine years old, battling with the devil of convent education.

Surrounded and indoctrinated by so much death I became an obessive morbid little funeral planner. As a child my parents only had to innocently leave the house without me, for their absence to end in an imaginary funeral. I worried that planning funerals would make them a sudden reality but still revelled in planning what clothes I would wear and choosing the inappropriate music.  

John and Jesus death cult cousins

Next work in progress is titled John and Jesus death cult cousins (too intense to chase the girls) taken from my poem St Anne of the upstairs Dartmouth dining room. I think they probably enjoyed a funeral although Jesus had an annoying habit of stopping them to raise up the dead to give them back to the living – all those funeral plans temporarily ruined. 

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