Sewing Houses

"It is increasingly clear to me that the border between memory and imaginiation does not exist in any definitive sense, but shifts, an expanding and contracting twilight. The past is as mysterious as the future: we never really know what happened there." Alison Croggon

Last week one of my dearest friend's Patti Gaal-Holmes came to visit me in the Cotswolds. Since our friendship began, about 7 years ago now, we have been preoccupied with the notion of 'Home' and what exactly it entails. Both of us have cross-cultural backgrounds. Patti was born in South Africa with German and Hungarian parents, then travelled all over the world and has now lived in England for 12 years. Mine is a similar story: born in Australia, Dutch grandparents, travelled the world, lived in England for 10 years. So where is Home in the tangle of all these places and histories?

Patti and I are collaborating to explore this idea of what Home is further. Me through song, Patti through drawing and film. We cut some paper and made a film of ourselves sewing houses to start our journey.

Patti says...

I have returned again to the wonderful South African artist Marlene Dumas, who has lived in Holland since 1976. She has a painting called 'Genetic Longing' (1984) and I think of this phrase as perhaps similar to the idea of 'Inherited Loss' which Emily and I are exploring...of how our past resides so much within our present: wherever we go, we take ourselves along, there is no escaping ourselves. And this leads also to a fragmentary sense of self: accumulated through all the myriad places, cultures, languages we live in, and as John Berger so eloquently says:

"Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world and – at its most extreme – abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd ... to emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disorientated one of fragments. (Berger 2005: 56)."