Shadow-lives | Kate McCalmont-Woods

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.

Well, it’s official – I’m now closer to 60 than I am to 50. Ugh!

I seem to have swapped the paraphernalia of parenthood for a bag of drugs, which I routinely plonk in the tray at airport security, hoping that no-one’s looking too closely – two asthma inhalers (a preventer and a reliever), omeprazole for my acid reflux, progesterone tablets, oestrogen gel, and 4 eipipen adrenaline auto-injectors for my tree nut allergy (yep, sorry – I’m that annoying person who prevents you from eating your nuts with your overpriced inflight drinks).

I’m well and truly in the thick of that period of life known as Sniper’s Alley, when one is constantly dodging the bullets of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer and much more. My mother and her brother both died of oesophageal cancer, their brother basically suffocated to death from ‘pigeon fancier’s lung’, their mother nodded off whilst sitting on her sofa and died of a heart attack, and my father and his mother both died after having strokes. Well, it’s a rather limited menu, but if I really have to choose, I think I’ll go for the sofa option, please!

Having said that, life itself is Sniper’s Alley. I was driving my husband to the train station the other morning; he was late and not a little stressed. The traffic lights changed – shall I be an ambler gambler? I don’t think so. There was a deep sigh and a hand raised to the head on my left as stress levels increased. Luckily the lights changed to green quite quickly. As we rounded the bend, a truck had shed its load of scaffolding poles into our lane, only shortly before. “We could have been under that, had I not stopped at the lights”, I observed.

It was a ‘Sliding Doors’ moment. The idea of an alternative life based on the decisions I have made really intrigues me. To a certain extent, I think that I was meant to make the choices I did, when I did, in a nod to fate, but, nevertheless, imagining my own ‘Midnight Library’ has its attractions.

I recently read a book called ‘The Gentleman from Peru’ by André Aciman. I saw it in Waterstones and bought it just because I liked the cover. A group of American college friends are on a sailing trip in the Mediterranean when there is a problem with their yacht, and they have to stay at a hotel on the Amalfi Coast whilst it is being repaired. They meet an elderly gentleman, and the book centres on their relationship with this mysterious character. During one of their conversations he says:

“We may no longer be the person we once were, but what if this person did not necessarily die but continued his life in the shadowland of our own, so that you could say that our life is filled with shadow-selves who continue to tag along and to beckon us in all directions even as we live our own lives – all these selves clamouring to have their say, their time, their life, if only we listened and gave into them…

…The old self, the new self, the shadow-self, self number seven or eleven, the self we always knew we were but never became, the self we left behind and never recovered, the might-have-been self that couldn’t be but might still be, though we both fear yet hope it might come along one day and rescue us from the person we’ve had to be all our years.

But as I said, it’s not just the past that haunts us. What haunts us with equal magnitude is what has not happened yet, for there are shadow-selves and shadow-lives waiting in the wings all the time. We are constantly reworking or reinventing both the past and the future. Sometimes we’re in the street or in a crowded bus, and we just know: that one day this person whose glance we caught or whose path we just crossed is another version of someone we know we’ve loved before and have yet to love again. But that person could just as easily be us in another body. And the beauty of it is that they feel it just as much as we do. Is this other person us or is it someone destined for us whom we keep missing each lifetime? Us in others, isn’t this the definition of love?”.

How happy am I that my ‘might-have-been’ 18 year old shadow-self has finally caught up, and rescued me? Better late, than never.