Tag Memories

La Cabina

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

It’s interesting how certain sensory and emotional experiences from your childhood stick with you even later on in life. I remember the smell of Camay soap in the bathroom, 4711 eau de cologne and my father’s Old Spice.

I also remember seeing lots of posters in the 70s of people, usually women, disappearing down lavatories. There is always that moment of hesitation…

I was always trying to stay up late. This was usually accomplished by offering to brush my mother’s hair. Of course, what I didn’t bargain for is the reason why there’s a watershed when it comes to TV viewing. There was Danny Kaye in ‘Five Pennies’ whose daughter ended up in an iron lung because she got polio, although I’m sure my parents told me it was because she had too many late nights hanging out in jazz clubs with her father, and didn’t get enough sleep.

But the film which has haunted me all these years is a Spanish 30 minute film – ‘La Cabina’ which was made in 1972, but must have been shown on the BBC sometime later because I think I must have seen it when I was about 8 years old. Funnily enough, it seems that a lot of people saw it ‘accidentally’ when they were of a similar age. There is very little dialogue which makes it even more disturbing. A man goes into a telephone box and can’t get out. Passersby try and help him but fail, as do the fire brigade. He’s hoisted onto the back of a lorry and taken away, and at one point he sees another man in a phone box on the back of a lorry. He ends up in a huge underground warehouse where he’s offloaded amidst hundreds of phone boxes with decaying bodies, some of which have ended their suffering by using the phone cable.

It won an International Emmy award. I wonder whether it should get an award for messing up a generation of children, along with ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ and the ‘Twilight Zone’.

Image from http://www.imdb.com

Arachnid

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Whenever I go to B&Q, I always want to come home and do some DIY; whenever I visit a beautiful garden, I always want to come home and sort out our garden; whenever I go to an exhibition, I always want to come home and make.

I’ve been feeling in need of a pick me up recently, and so yesterday I headed into London on a hot, Notting Hill Carnival, Bank Holiday Monday to catch Louise Bourgois’ ‘Maman’ on its last day at Tate Modern, the very space for which it was commissioned back in 2000. There’s no doubt that it’s impressive at 9m tall – again, I ask myself whether it’s all about the size, but I think any spider larger than real life would have an impact. I had an overwhelming urge to touch it, but resisted in light of the ‘Please Do Not Touch Sign’. I also found myself wondering how they got it into the building, memories of Johnny Vegas’ struggles coming to mind.

It was well worth the trip, a rare chance to see a piece in the flesh in the very place for which it had been made. Having said that, I’ve seen some images of it in a landscape, which I find particularly effective.

Tate Modern’s website on ‘Maman’:

Louise Bourgeois started making sculptures of spiders in the 1990s. This version is her biggest spider. Its title, Maman, is French for mummy. The artist said spiders reminded her of her mother: ‘Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever … spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.‘

I’m a bit behind with things at home, and we’re starting to amass some really impressive cobwebs. I watched as a flying insect became entangled in one of them; in a flash the spider came from nowhere and quickly got to work wrapping it up.

I’m not sure that spiders are clever as such, but they do have great skill. I don’t really think of them as being helpful and protective: they set traps that you can’t see, they ambush you and then swaddle you up until they consume you. Although, I don’t have a problem with them, as they catch flies etc, as long as they are not where they’re not supposed to be, such as on the bedroom ceiling above my head, or in the bed.

Lifelong arachnaphobe, Primo Levi, in his essay ‘The Fear of Spiders’:

“The spider is the enemy-mother who envelops and encompasses, who wants to make us re-enter the womb from which we have issued, bind us tightly and take us back to the impotency of infancy, subject us again to her power…”

I’ve tried not to be either of those spider mothers. I’ve tried not to be suffocating and I’ve tried to resist the urge to fix things. I’ve definitely failed; I often tell my daughter that I’m trying my best, and, when she’s older, not just to remember the times when I’ve not been at my best, like I seem to have done with my own mother. It’s that negative bias again, I suppose. I’m now actively remembering all the times when she was kind and caring, supportive, and all the laughs we had together, which by far outnumber the not so good.

The Eyes Have It

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I went to see Jenny Saville’s The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery a few weeks ago. I went thinking that I admired her work; I came out knowing that I only liked some of it, mainly her early work. It was Michael Craig- Martin all over again.

Her canvases are huge. It made me wonder whether it is all about size. If they were smaller would they still have the same impact? If something is large do we immediately perceive it as being impressive? I always thought that large meant there was nowhere to hide, but now I’m not so sure; maybe it’s just a case of first impressions.

I love the way she paints flesh, in her earlier work that is. I look at my skin and I see those colours, usually with the advent of summer, with a sigh and a determination to keep as much of it covered up as possible, no matter the heat. I have those imprints once I have relieved myself from the claustrophobia of overly restrictive clothing. I can relate.

And then there’s the work which comes later, the last image being an example, at the more restrained end of the spectrum. I can’t connect with it; I think to myself, why paint such wonderfully realistic eyes and then treat the rest in the way that she has, bordering on abstract figurativism? I feel like she’s stuck on a fence; she wants to embrace the abstract approach but still wants us to know that she can paint a good eye. I find it jarring and slightly irritating, probably because it resonates with my own feelings of indecision.

Last night I was channel surfing, and came across Alan Yentob’s last interview which he made in March this year, two months before he died. I’m a great fan of his Imagine series; you can tell that he has a real interest in people. The interview is with Jenny Saville, on the eve of the opening of her Gaze exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna. It is only 10 minutes long.

During the interview, in which it rather ironically takes her an age to make eye contact with Yentob, Saville comments that she likes painting eyes; think of all the visual information and memories which go through this structure, something she has been intrigued by since she was a child. Making her heads so large allows her the freedom to experiment with the surface of the paint. From a distance there is the holistic nature of the head, but as you get closer the surface is heightened. She confirms that she is committed to figurative painting but is experimenting with how she can get realism in the face which goes beyond a simple rendering. Whilst looking at one of her large heads, she comments that there is something psychological going on in that you are convinced by the head because of the eyes – something happens in your brain that allows you to piece it together, and as you get closer to it you go on a journey. So she’s using the figurative to help the viewer make sense of the abstract?

That’s explains a lot, but I’m still not convinced by the eyes.

Wondering About Wandering

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It’s been almost 3 weeks since my tutorial with Jonathan, and even longer since my last blog post. I’m usually very good at writing tutorials up immediately afterwards, whilst I can still remember what we discussed. I don’t usually take notes – it’s too distracting.

Oh, how I wish I had taken notes, but I think that I can still remember the gist of it.

My clearest recollection is just how good it was to have a chat about something other than accidents, operations, hospitals and pain relief. On this subject Jonathan mentioned Late Night Ramblings, how at first glance it looks like a map but then when you look closer you realise that it doesn’t relate to anywhere. We talked about the methodology – what came first? I explained that I started off with the coloured lines, placed the dots at the intersections and then decided to add the contours and finally the grid – in retrospect I probably should have reversed the order as it was particularly difficult putting in the contour lines after the event – I couldn’t see the lines for the lines. We discussed the previous experiments which led to this point in particular the use of the photo of my father to create the outline of the figure, how the pose still retains its meaning, the angle of the shoulders and the head looking down, and how, because he reads my blog backwards from top to bottom, it only became apparent that the photo was the source of the outline once he had worked his way down. He also referred to What Was I Thinking? and my openness as to how I viewed my actions.

We talked about whether I would experiment with other media – I explained that I liked the flimsiness of the flip chart paper as it reminds me of the paper on which maps are produced and how I am interested in the idea of folding. Jonathan referenced how maps are folded, in a concertina, and how a piece of paper no matter what size it is can only be folded in half 7 times. Intrigued, I looked into this further after the tutorial finished. Generally, this is the case although in 2002, Britney Gallivan, a high school student in California, set a new world record by folding a piece of tissue paper 12 times, but it was 1.219km long. Funnily enough, whilst driving to Exeter yesterday morning to start and finish what my daughter was en route to do when she had her accident, clear out her room at uni, we had the pleasure of listening to Radio 2 when the Paddy McGuiness show came on, and listeners were invited to message in to explain how it can be true that if you fold a piece of paper 42 times it could reach the Moon? Did you know that you can only fold a piece of paper 7 times I asked my husband. Yes, you’ve already told me that, he replied. It’s a matter of exponential growth – if you assume that the thickness of a piece of paper is, say, 0.1mm, then when you fold it in half 42 times it will theoretically be 439,804km thick, approximately 55,000km in excess of the distance between the Earth and the Moon, the same kind of principle as in A Bird In The Hand.

I mentioned that I was thinking of creating a ‘map’ which would embody all that I have learnt over the course, and have been toying with experimenting with canvas, how I would need to think about image transfer etc. Jonathan mentioned Citrasolv which works really well on laser print, especially high quality print such as National Geographic. After the tutorial I watched a few YouTube videos, ordered some and have had to wait a couple of weeks for its arrival, this Thursday.

We then discussed Raita Bitless, and how Jonathan felt that there are some very important elements which are emerging and this is one of them. It feels like these are important memories which need to be explored further, and I agreed, explaining that sometime over the next couple of months I want to go back up to the Midlands and spend some time just wandering and reliving.

I’m sure that some of these discussions were prompted by a question, but the only one I can vaguely remember is when Jonathan asked me whether I was missing anything or needed anything more. I said that I didn’t think so, that I am quite happy just doing what I am doing. I have realised a lot about myself and the way I work (or not) – I had been attempting to squeeze the round me into a square hole. As such, I have effectively torn up my work plan, as it’s just not who I am, and have decided just to wander; to go on a dérive, and to wonder. Jonathan liked the idea of wondering whilst wandering – there’s a name for it, he said. I thought of it afterwards – a homophone – although apparently wonder and wander are not actually homophones because of a very subtle difference in pronunciation of the first syllable – what killjoys! I like it anyway, and there is a lovely interplay between the two.

We then got onto the subject of the research paper and he referred to The Paradox Of Choice. I told him that I felt as if I had been told to go out and buy something, anything; that I had decided that I wanted to buy a cake but that I couldn’t specify which cake I wanted until I had visited all the cake shops and seen all that was on offer. I would have responded much better to having been given a choice of topic out of a small selection, akin to an exam paper; that I felt overwhelmed by choice and asking me what intrigues me doesn’t really narrow it down at all. Anyway, because of where my current experiments have taken me, I have decided to think about maps particularly in an autobiographical sense. We then went on to discuss maps and the issues with them in terms of distortion both physically in respect of projections and political motivations, perspective etc. Jonathan also mentioned Professor Steve Peters – Jonathan had been to a talk and had been given a copy of The Chimp Paradox – I had started reading it a while ago but didn’t finish it as I was probably distracted by something else. He referred specifically to the idea of the helicopter view. It’s a technique to gain perspective on something by imagining hovering over the issue in a helicopter which enables detachment and a more rational and objective view.

Does the need to do the research paper risk having a negative impact on my current wandering? This was a difficult question to answer, but on the whole I don’t think so – I’ve already recognised that I am a person of extremes, either really tidy or messy, focussed or distracted, honed in on the detail or preferring the bigger picture – each will appeal to my polar opposite needs and I am optimistic that what I discover whilst writing the research paper will have significant impact on my current practice.

I hope that I have covered everything we discussed although we must have talked about carbon paper at some point because I have used it recently. I have done a few things recently – I need to include them in a post but, frankly, all I have wanted to do is to make and not necessarily reflect on and write about it.

Raita Bitless

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

Not only did I not get the obvious joke with the placeholder name of ‘Noah Bitmore’ until half-way into the session on Tacit Agency with Prof Paul Haywood, but I didn’t really get the session itself at first.

I think part of my problem was that I came into it with a preconception from the title. My understanding of tacit agency is a legal one. It turned out to be about the relationship between who I am and where I am – an individual’s sense of connectedness with their physical and social environment.

The exercise of describing an important place without naming it was a revelation. I wrote white railings, the smell of coal fires, lemon curd tarts in a Family Circle tin. I was describing staying with my grandmother. I’ve previously mentioned that visiting my grandmothers is a strong childhood memory and one which evokes a feeling of constancy. We mostly stayed with my mother’s mother. I recently came across some glasses on eBay and ended up buying them because they were very similar to the ones she had, out of which I had my pop, usually dandelion and burdock, or sometimes shandy, poured out of a glass bottle for which you would get some money if you returned it, which was stored on the floor in her pantry.

I love a pantry. Shelves full of interesting things like bottles of Camp coffee, and biscuit tins of jam and lemon curd tarts, packets of crisps and jars of marmalade.

She’d ask me to shell peas from her garden for dinner (I’d eat most of them), the outside loo with the wooden seat, housecoats, woolly hats and Victory V sweets on the ‘buz’ to Derby sitting next to her on the front seat on the top deck so that I felt like I was flying as we went over Swarkestone Bridge, walking down to the village shop where she’d buy me cola bottles and Swizzels double lollipops, going past the pub on the way and breathing in the hoppy aroma, stodgy Yorkshire pudding whilst we watched Emmerdale Farm, the seersucker checked table cloths, the cupboard full of Woman’s Own and People’s Friend magazines from which I used to read the serialised stories, sometimes annoyingly having to miss an instalment because she hadn’t bought that week’s issue, going to Swad and having a cream doughnut, spending hours making mud pies and selling them from my shop in her front porch, the tops of her hold ups visible as she bent over to clean out the grate in the morning and lay and light a new fire – she must have had asbestos fingers – with her horse brasses hanging either side of the fireplace and her ornamental carthorses on the mantlepiece, climbing up the stairs at night into a freezing cold bedroom, shivering under the counterpane until I warmed up, memorising the Lord’s Prayer from the framed embroidery on the wall, watching horse racing and wrestling on the TV with her on Saturdays, hours of country walks pretending to be a horse, and many hours of playing with her plastic cowboy horse in the front room, playing cards and going up the passageway to visit Uncle Walter who would slip me 50p and Auntie Tamar with her slightly greasy hair who never seemed to move from her chair beside her 3 bar electric fire, but most of all, the white railings – a flutter of excitement because we were almost there.

As for my father’s mother, not so many memories. Although we visited her a lot, we rarely stayed with her as she didn’t live far from my other grandmother. The garden shed where I used to spend a lot of time lost in my imagination, I loved the smell, I loved the greenhouse, the smell of tomatoes, when I smell that smell I’m right back there, I saw a candle in Sainsbury’s the other day which was supposed to smell of tomato plants, but I’m not sure, searching for frogs on her rockery at the bottom of the garden, jumping over her decorative white fencing, yes, pretending to be a horse, being fascinated with her dressing table, glass containers and hairbrushes with tortoiseshell, the plastic pink powder container with a puff and her stone Westie doorstop I used to pretend was a real dog, Battenberg cake, her taking exception to me repeatedly playing my Growing Up With Wally Whyton record which I had got as a Christmas present one year, which included the lyrics:

“Oh you canny shove your granny off a bus, oh you canny shove your granny off a bus, oh you canny shove your granny for she’s your mammy’s mammy, oh you canny shove your granny off a bus. You can shove your other granny off a bus, you can shove your other granny off a bus, you can shove your other granny for she’s your daddy’s mammy, you can shove your other granny off a bus.”

Visiting her in the nursing home with my father and the patch on her forehead she kept on scratching, her limp arm and having to go with her when she wanted to go to the loo, watching her eat a slice of bread and butter with her cup of tea whilst she told us about the old man who kept going AWOL, told off by my father for not singing at her funeral, and the bracelet and the ring that she left me.

In my Unit One feedback there was a question: Beyond the photographs you are using, are you channelling memories through your practical experimentation in other ways – how might you explore more of this? Might you introduce more conversational elements – your voice is already present in your work, but would it feel relevant or interesting to explore recordings in text or sound? What would happen if you were to layer those recordings over animated/ simple stop-frame slide sequences of your cyanotypes and prints?

I’d been thinking of exploring using video before the feedback, and having just written this post I think that these childhood memories are so rooted in the sense of place that I need to go back there and make some mud pies.

By the way I dislike my voice, it sounds totally different to how it does in my head, and that’s why I resorted to using Siri on the recorded message on my red telephone, which is one more thing that I’ve yet to progress…

In the meantime, in the words of Kazimir Malevich,

Swim! The free white sea, infinity, lies before you.

A Wobble

Kate McCalmont-Woods 2 Comments

I’ve often suffered from buyer’s remorse; the last time it happened was when I bought my new rug in Marrakech. Did I just buy it in the fervour of the moment? Would it actually fit in at home? How was I going to get it back home on the plane? Would it fit in my suitcase? Did I pay too much? I did haggle for it, but did I haggle enough? Had someone else bought something similar and paid a lot less? If they had, how would that make me feel? Whilst I appreciate that the worth of something is what someone is prepared to pay for it, everything is so much simpler and fairer when there is a fixed price.

I experienced a new feeling recently – blogger’s remorse. Should I have posted ‘Three Conversations With My Mother’? In the moment it felt right, but as is always the case with me, the doubt started to creep in. The phrase ‘act in haste, repent at leisure’ could have been coined for me.

I’ve already mentioned that I seem to be a person of extremes – I’m either very guarded or a total oversharer, particularly after a couple, after which I’m plagued by cringe inducing thoughts. I had one such cringe whilst having a shower the other morning. I suddenly thought, everyone who sees my blog (I’m not kidding myself – it’s not that many!) now knows the most personal information about my relationship with my mother in her last days. Also, how would I feel if I saw my images elsewhere in the public domain? In all honesty, I felt a bit panicky and decided just not to think about it.

But not thinking about things and hoping they will just go away is not an answer. So, later that day I decided that I would process this sudden feeling of regret. I’ve always known, in the back of my mind, that I have to deal with that period of my life in order to move forward. Memories of it have taken my head hostage and I needed to offer a swap – somewhere else for them to inhabit, to free up my mind so that I have the space to remember all that was good. In essence, I have emotionally vomitted the negative and harmful feelings onto the page, and I can now look at them and still feel the way I did, but when I put them away, hopefully, they will stay away.

This course is a once in a lifetime opportunity for me, and I need to wring everything I possibly can out of it. I’m trying to find out who I am, and in so doing I need to be fully committed to the process. To avoid sharing parts of my life because they are too personal would be to cheat myself, and so, I’m all in.

Reflecting on Resentment II

Kate McCalmont-Woods 3 Comments

I’ve rewritten this post so many times. It has become progressively shorter. Sitting back and reflecting, I can see what is important. The first version was just a rant.

In late 2022, my mother was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. No treatment was offered. At best she had 6 months left. Her GP had messed up. The hospital messed up. My sister and I cared for her full-time. It was the worst, and darkest period of my life.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Six months to live? Well, we could go places and make the most of it, create some new memories. But she was already too weak. Instead, the memories I have of that time seep into my mind when it’s not thinking of something else, usually before I go to sleep; then I can’t go to sleep and I sit up alone in the kitchen turning it all over, reliving it. Nothing makes it feel any better.

My mother died at home in the spring of 2023, three days before her 85th birthday. I cannot say with any honesty that she experienced quality of life in those last months. She was waiting to die, and I was just watching her gradually turn into a skeleton.

I resent that medical professionals have failed my family, not just in respect of my mother, but also my father – I made formal complaints in both instances – lessons will be learnt, apparently – but this has done nothing to ease my resentment.

I resent that because she was old, my mother was effectively written off.

I resent that everything was such a battle and I had to spend so much time chasing and making sure things were done.

I resent that there are old people in hospital who are overlooked, and who don’t have a voice or someone to speak up for them.

I resent that my sister and I were left to deal with everything, both before and after my mother’s death.

I resent that in the last few months of my mother’s life the days were short, and the nights were long.

I resent that those last few precious months were stolen from me.

I resent that the last words my mother spoke to me were when she wasn’t herself.

But, most of all, I resent the resentment that I feel: it’s preventing me from moving on.

Miscellany I

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I’m conscious that I committed to doing an automatic drawing a day to try and change my mindset. I’m allowing myself the inclusion of exploring Procreate as well!

I particularly like the charcoal drawing. I used a piece of compressed charcoal and made swirling marks using it on its narrow edge and full on its side. I then rubbed it out and repeated it but this time playing around with the end and varying the motions. The concept of layers appeals to me (memories, past lives/ identities…) particularly the traces left behind of the first drawing and I was surprised by the range of marks I made depending on how I held the charcoal and the pressure I used. There are some delicate areas, followed by some jagged, harsh marks. Some lines appear to be faltering and hesitant whilst others have more purpose and at times are almost punctuation marks in what would otherwise be a stream of unconsciousness.

The second image I am treating as an automatic pastel drawing – I randomly chose colours and effects from the Procreate menu and I think the result is interesting, although I miss the haptics and the smell of the real thing as well as the tactile relationship between the medium and support. I’m not sure that I would use it going forward, except maybe as a tool to experiment with, although I have previously decreed that collage is just not my bag – how times change! I might use it if I decided to go down a graphic flat colour route (as in the third image) and digital collage is something I will definitely explore further – no bits on the floor and no need to glue – what’s not to like? I’ve been thinking about how I could incorporate digital collage into a mixed media piece of work – perhaps a giclée print onto a canvas, sealed with medium and then oil paint?

There are lots of thoughts chasing themselves around my head – I’ve been ignoring them in the hope that as and when I consciously acknowledge them they may have already got themselves into some kind of order. Just doing what I’m doing at the moment seems to be creating even more possibilities and permutations which is exciting.

I can sense that I’m feeling a lot more relaxed about making my experimental work ‘public’. I really look forward to starting the day by just letting my hand wander across the page – it’s the only time when there’s no expectation on me to achieve anything – renewing the buildings insurance, fixing the E20 error message on the washing machine – just a moment when I’m at one…