[ Family ]

5 to 4

The inconceivable but inevitable has happened. The family, my family, my unit, my security, my strength has decreased. A section has been torn away.
We were five, all my life we have been five. And now we are four.

  

In 2014 I made this sculpture in a small size, last year I scaled it up.
The figure is tiny compared to its family support, the figure sat looking out with all that strength behind it.
Then the weight suddenly shifted.
Now we are four.
We four have been strong for a month, but off and on we will loose our balance.
November’s shock made us robust. And busy. But on the hills in between England and Wales I saw a beauty, and briefly I let what has happened in a little. Not enough to fall but enough to understand the pain a little. It is inconceivable that my Daddy is gone but I know Mummy now sleeps alone and the pain I know she must feel hurts us also.

“Family 5
Is about what I can be with the support of my family, we are 5.”

Although in memory and experiences we will always be five, to live now we must try to rebalance ourselves. The four girls, my mother and my two sisters and I will shift our balances.
We are strong and will be strong.
We will never be as we were but through him we are as we are now and we will address the weight and support each other as I have been supported through them all my life.
And while we are here the moon will always shine down on us.

Land and Leaves

In Barcelona I painted this painting

“A moment caught between the noise. I see my ‘Family Tree’ painting and realise its not a family tree at all its just about parents and me. The orange pair of leaves is them, as strong and intense in colour as the land. But I am a leaf. They are leaves.”

The other leaves represented sisters and friends, support. But in orange there has always been the land and there has always been my parents.

And leaves have their time and then they are returned to the earth.

 

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Family

The new steel circle pieces are about support, each circle comes from the other but takes its own journey. 
Family 5 Is about what I can be with the support of my family, we are 5.




  

Family 3  ( in progress at foundry below and in Woolff Gallery )

Is about parenting. I saw a cormorant dive in the muddy deep river outside the studio, he was gone for some time but his ripples kept multiplying.

The people are tiny to suggest the smallness of ourselves within the world but the hugeness of giving life. It is about how two people can influence an ever increasing circle that gets bigger and bigger, long after you have dived into the water.