The first piece of work that started with this theme,“Dining In”, was created in the studio on Fuji Velvia transparency film. I have now titled it “Egg and Bacon Pie” in reference to the picnic meal we used to eat every Easter holiday when we went for a long drive as a family.

Originally this was a diptych. The first piece (shown above) depicting the domestic facade that my mother had created, and then the second arranged identically to the first but where I had thoroughly burnt each piece of food on the plate. Each black, charcoal morsel representing the death of my parents marriage.
The pair of photos was created around the time of my parents divorce in 1992.

Gradually during my parents separation I began to learn from my mother snippets of information about her marriage that severely contrasted with the social image she had been maintaining for 30 years. Partly, she wanted me to know what went wrong, but at the same time, the tension built between us as I now became a threat to her continuing lies. Even after her divorce, she held so tightly to her image, at work and amongst friends, because losing it meant her annihilation.

Although I was brought up in a small Australian city in the 1970’s my mother embodied the persona of a nice, middle class, Victorian English woman from a Jane Austen novel … Not that she had ever read any literature, neither was she middle class. Both my parents were born to labourers, but had themselves managed to stay in school until they were fifteen and enter the white collar world as bank clerks.

My mother created a world in the suburbs. A three bedroom house, two children, bank officer husband, pet dog and caged canary. She grew vegetables in the backyard and the fashionable australian flora in the front. She was nice to her neighbours, and polite to the butcher. She even maintained a group of friends from a former neighbourhood, where the families all had their babies at the same time, in the same street.
We went to church on Sundays.

Like in the Jane Austen stories, the Domestic Arts and Crafts were the foundation of my mothers existence. Her talent for choosing colours and textures, and her skills at sewing, knitting, creating beautifully iced cakes, choosing interior decor, and gardening were undeniable. She laboured for hours making beautiful clothes for me. At the tender age of five I had a wardrobe of 16 handmade dresses, delicately embroidered and smocked.

I could not help but absorb the visual feasts around me. An absence of relationship went unnoticed as I learnt to sew and cook and tend my own garden. I loved the special birthdays, the beautiful Christmas decorations, the Royal Albert tea cups, silver plated cutlery and crystal glasses that came out on special occasions. I wanted new clothes. I couldn’t wait to choose new material and new dress patterns. By the time I was eight I too was a little victorian woman creating a beautiful life and being good at school.

Self Portrait

The series “Dining In” is my attempt to capture the paradox that I was living in, where I saw, all around me, everyday, my mother clinging tightly to her mid-victorian fantasy, despite the fact that what it hid from the outside world was slowly eating her, eating me, and eating my little brother too.

As I progress through this body of work I am trying to perfect a craft, and send a message. But this time the message to the world is that ‘there is something very, very ugly in there’. Behind the curtains, underneath the crocheted silk tablecloth, in between the glistening christmas tinsel there is a monster.

When I can express it visually, as I am trying now, the linen and lace will be as white as my mother’s virginal bridal gown, and then macabre will be the most grotesque gut shuddering nightmare that I can conceive.

Living Blobs

When I was 38 I was living alone and had not had children. I had been experiencing some health problems for quite a few years and one day they started to get a lot worse. I went to my GP and was told to have an ultrasound.

For 43 minutes I watched the black and white screen of the ultra Sound machine as the nurse measured all the curious growths I had been accumulating in my womb. I had polyps, fibroids, endometrial folds, an undivided septum, endometrial thickenings and some gelatinous cysts.

None of these were expected to be cancerous, but they were causing me a lot of trouble and I needed to have them looked at properly by a surgeon who could take a biopsy. It’s a very common thing as women grow older.

During this first Ultrasound I started to become intrigued with the shapes I had seen, and the thought that although I had not born children I had managed to bare some sort of fruit, I guessed.

After my hysteroscopy the surgeon showed me coloured photos she had taken inside my womb. They were beautiful! The soft velvety red folds of the endometrium were bathed in an orange glow, as the salty fluid she had pumped inside me reflected the light of the hysteroscope.

I regretted not taking the photo home with me so from then on became obsessed with trying to replicate this photo. I took thousands of photos of out of focus red things, flowers, leather, cloth, scarves and started to sketch out how I might resolve the image.

Sketches of womb and surgical photo

Sketch of endometrial folds

Trying to replicate the texture of the endometrium

Sketch

The surgical photo was divided into four pieces. I collected a box full of images and drawings to help remind me what it looked like. But ten years down the track the memory has faded and all I have left is the feeling that something is missing.

It took a long time to convince me to go under the knife but when I was 45 I had a hysterectomy. They took all my blobs and sent them off to the lab. They were declared benign and unceremoniously chucked away.

Not long before that I had a conversation with a male friend who had never had children but had also had a vasectomy to prevent him from ever having children accidentally! He said to me that anything he produced would only be a disappointment … A disappointing living blob.

Sketch of my conversation with “nameless”