Tag Father

Solitude

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I feel particularly drawn to this photograph of my father. It’s solitary and contemplative, evoking a sense of vulnerability – a side which was never apparent whilst I was growing up. It makes me want to go and give him a hug. He was the world’s best hugger. Either that, or he’s watching someone doing something and he’s not that impressed – a more familiar experience.

Having missed out on visiting a couple of exhibitions on Sunday, I decided to experiment. I took a piece of A1 flipchart paper, a graphite stick and a 5B pencil and got to work. First I created multiple silhouettes of the image using the graphite stick.

I was inspired by the Richter drawings (The Rich Are Getting Richter) and used the tiles on the kitchen floor to create texture with some frottaging.

Having really liked the effect of some of the lines and marks made in my automatic drawings, I used the 5B pencil to create a wandering line, holding it at the top and twisting it from side to side in the process and then holding it on its side to create a second softer line. I like the idea of tree roots and mycorrhizas connecting and creating a support network for trees, a concept we touched on in last week’s session. The lines are connecting each figure so it’s no longer alone. They are also reminiscent of a map or a mapping out. Not sure which, but I like the effect. I like the delicacy of the lines. They also remind me of the lines in skulls at the points where the plates have fused or cracks in a surface, fault lines. I wasn’t keen on the overlap on the two figures on the right which created a hard box-like edge, so I cropped it out on the last image.

I really enjoyed doing this, particularly the lack of control of the line making and the unpredictability of the frottaging, and despite that, it does bear a resemblance to the vague image I had in my head. It ties in with the idea of shadow selves (Sniper’s Alley) and the idea of inheritance and being made up of multitudes (Bus Replacement Service). It’s definitely an approach I will develop further, but I’ll use better quality paper next time.

Bus Replacement Service

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I was planning on going into London yesterday to catch Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker at Whitechapel Gallery (as well as revisit the Cardiff audio walk), and Linder: Danger Came Smiling at the Hayward, before they close in the next day or two. But what I forgot was that it was a Sunday on a Bank Holiday weekend, a perfect time for railway engineering works. A bus replacement service would almost double my usual journey time, and so I decided to stay at home. Instead, I had a look on Whitechapel Gallery website, to see what I had missed. There is an interesting piece on Rodney by Caleb Azumah Nelson, particularly on their relationships with their fathers.

Rodney had, and ultimately died at the age of 37 from a complication of, sickle cell anemia. He was in the midst of a sickle cell crisis when his father died and he was unable to attend his Nine Night.

In the House of My Father 1977, photograph (Image Source: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org accessed 5/5/25)

Made from his own skin, the house is held together with small dressmaking pins.

This is the first piece of work by Rodney which Nelson encountered, purely by accident:

’The strength, not in the structure, but in the vulnerability of exposure, his open palm an invitation into his heart, his family. With this gesture, Rodney suggests, this is who I am, this is who I might be.

How does the self come to be? And how do we make space to be our whole selves? … a condition he would have inherited from his father, who would’ve inherited it from his father before that. Their selves, our selves, folding into one another: we contain multitudes. And what else do we inherit? And how do we carry around these inheritances, how do we make space for them in our lives?…’

At the time he was reflecting on his own relationship with his father:

’… wrangling with the things he cannot say to me, or doesn’t have the language for, the many rooms in the house to which I do not have the key…’

He finishes his piece with:

’I believe Art gives us a space to be honest, to confront, to dismantle, to reassemble. To imagine. Visiting and revisiting Rodney’s work reminds me that other worlds are possible. It reminds me, that even in the face of continued crisis, it is necessary to dream. It reminds me that , even in the face of death, we must continue to inhabit many rooms, to hold space where we can be honest, where we can be our whole selves. Where we can feel alive.’

So many thoughts have come to mind:

  • The idea of inheritance and how we find a space for it in our everyday lives. To me this feels like a burden not just in the physical sense of belongings, and ‘stuff’, but to the extent that I might feel defined by it: I don’t want to be, I want to be my own person steering my own course independently of what has gone on before, but I can’t ignore the extent to which others have shaped me. Last weekend, I lost count of the number of times friends commented how my daughter is a mini-me or the spitting image. No, she’s not. She’s her own person, living her own life. But, inevitably, I will have had an input into who she is, even if it’s just a matter of genetics.
  • I have inherited my family history from my parents. I used to spend ages looking through the family photo albums talking to my mother about the contents. I feel an enormous responsibility to pass this knowledge on. It’s a burden. My daughter is not particularly interested. Maybe it’s an age thing – as we age we need a greater understanding of who we are? Or maybe it’s a digital thing, we don’t have a physical record of our lives lying around the house to prompt an inquiry and so the questions never get asked. Sometimes I think that I should write it all down in case she’s ever interested, and other times I think that I’ll take it all with me and free her from the burden.
  • I think that I’ve been dismantling myself over the last few months. I’m not entirely sure that I’ll be able to reassemble myself, but maybe a few left over bits here and there wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I could even write my own instruction manual.
  • The child/ parent relationship: I remember the moment when I realised that my parents didn’t know or have the answer to everything; that they were human. It really stopped me in my tracks.
  • The idea of the house with many rooms; our ancestors folding into one another; the self containing multitudes.

If You See It, Just Buy It.

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

This post has been sitting in draft for a while now. I’m not sure why I’ve been delaying in publishing it – maybe a reticence to commit in case something better comes along. Rather like the way I shop: I like to browse in every single shop to see all the available options, and for the most part end up going back to the first shop, several hours later. My husband, on the other hand, sets out with a list and buys the first item which fits the bill – his advice to me is that if I see it, I should just buy it, and save myself the aggravation. So what if I do have a better idea further down the line? That’s part of the process isn’t it? To reflect, adapt and recognise the need for a change of direction.

I’ve been giving further thought to what I would like to explore over the next couple of years. I’m afraid it’s not a laugh a minute, but it’s something that’s been on my mind for a while.

Not to be egocentric about it, but it’s ME! Then again that’s not a surprise as everything I make, even within the constraints of my art class, is subconsciously about me in one way or another: how I see the world; what matters to me; what interests me; about me; my experiences.

I remember sitting in the back of the family car as a child, probably on one of those Sunday afternoon drives in the Black Forest my parents used to like, with my brother on the back seat playing my dad’s favourite Elvis Presley and James Last songs on his double deck cassette player and thinking to myself: Who am I? This is me. Here. Right now. I almost tried to climb inside myself which messed with my head a bit. I must have been about 7 years old.

Who am I, as a person, as an artist? Hopefully by the end of the next two years I might have a better idea.

I’m particularly interested in my identity in the sense of nature and nurture: who is the authentic me – the one that drew its first breath? As Z recently mused on her blog ‘we will never be as unmarked as when we were born’. How has that version of me been influenced by my life experience, in particular, the roles I have had in my life?

This line of thought was prompted by the death of my mother in 2023. As my father had passed away in 2013, she was my lone parent. It struck me that my role as a daughter was coming to an end. Arguably it had gone on hiatus sometime earlier when I started to care for her following her cancer diagnosis, whereupon my role became that of carer. Some roles in life are mutually exclusive and in my case this was more or less true of my roles as daughter and carer – maybe it was a coping mechanism. As a result, I have issues in processing that brief, but cataclysmic, period of my life.

My mother’s death also made me consider my role as a sibling and the subsequent sense of estrangement I feel from my brother and, conversely, the closeness I have with my sister as a result of our shared experience of caring: sometimes only someone who has gone through the same experience can truly understand how it feels.

What effect does the ending of a role have on identity? What if I feel that I have failed in some roles? What if others think that I have failed? What if my roles conflict or were not mine by choice?

In being a mother I reflected on my experiences as a daughter to try and be the best mother I could be, and so the cycle will continue, perhaps. I’ve been a career woman, a homemaker and, still am a wife. At some stage I have lost the sense of the real me, if there is one: some roles allowed others to prosper whilst I took a back seat. Words which particularly resonate with me are from Deborah Levy’s “The Cost of Living” :

“It requires skill, time, dedication and empathy to create a home that everyone enjoys and that functions well. Above all else, it is an act of immense generosity to be the architect of everyone else’s well-being.”

In my head I’ve been Norman Foster.