Stealing from ghosts

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.