I have made a pamphlet set called Unvanishing as part of the Arts Council Develop Your Creative Practice grant I was awarded to make visual art in tandem with writing Lostling and to take my writing in  new directions.

 

In the pamphlets I have paired images of the art I made with short extracts from Lostling. My artwork aims to 'unvanish' my baby brother and his peers, stillborn in an era when hospital and funerary practices made these babies disappear.  It has grown from my interest in how traumatic grief passes from one generation to the next and how creative work can be a belated, vicarious act of mourning. The works speak to notions of absence, elegy, remembrance, and ongoingness – the titles of the four pamphlets that make up Unvanishing.

I am drawn to methods – cyanotype printing, casting and tie-dye – which create traces or imprints of something only temporarily present.  I incorporate found objects into my work, both domestic (like nappy pins and baby garments) and natural (such as flowers and shells), as nature is what all beings ultimately become. I use digital photography to make single images, photo-series, collages, and films. The phone lens is a mediating eye that helps me look at difficult things. The framing I do during and after taking photographs feels containing, giving edges to the edgeless.   

Each image of the artwork is accompanied by a prose extract taken, directly or indirectly, from Lostling. Combining image and text is a new approach for me, although one that has tendrils in my past. I am the daughter of a painter father and a mother who used reading and writing to explore and understand herself. Images from my life that lingered in my head have long been an inspiration for my creative writing. And I’ve written several stories centring on artworks that fascinated me. What would it mean, I wondered, to make an artwork myself and to write about this – a kind of self-ephraksis? 

It felt both alluring and occasionally troubling to create a two- or three-dimensional object from a mental image. Art felt too direct, words seemed safer. Sometimes I abandoned, an idea for a visual work and this was a helpful self-protection. Quite often though, the making brought a welcome settling to what had previously felt unsettling. Sometimes a piece of art I created arose from something I had already written, at other times the artmaking came first and was a way into the wordmaking. 

When I began thinking about how to share my visual works, the two modes of expression – word and image – felt jarringly disparate. What to say about an artwork beyond its title? How to explain this thing I’ve made? I thought of artist Louise Bourgeois declaring: if I have to explain, I have failed. Ultimately, I reached for juxtaposition – placing a piece of my creative writing next to my visual piece. Sometimes the writing reflects on the artmaking, sometimes it doesn’t. By pairing image and micro-memoir, as I have done here, I hope each will expand the other.