Work in progress
I love showing my work-in-progress. Often, it is more rewarding than showing the final image. Right now I am working on a portrait of my great grandmother Yvonne and her older sister Olga. The photo I have is from the early 1900’s, and to discover the reality of the image I decided to simplify it through the linocut printing process. In the French village where my great-grandmother was born everybody worked, even children. Yvonne was not healthy enough to work in the fields, instead, she learned to sew and became a seamstress. Olga was protective of her little sister. Later, Olga married a sailor on the English Channel. Yvonne was my mother’s grandmother. Once, when my mother and her sister arrived in the village for the summer, Yvonne sewed them matching skirts and blouses to replace their American shorts. My mother still has another blouse Yvonne made for her when mom was fifteen years old, during another stay in the village.
This coming weekend I plan to see my mother, and to examine the blouse made by my great-grandmother’s hands. I will measure it and draft it’s pattern, and I intend on recreating one in my size. I want to wear my ancestor’s design like a hug from my past. By working on making an object, a real concrete thing, I find ways to connect with the stories about my grandparents and great-grandparents. I begin to share in the direct experiences I know they also had. I can commune with Yvonne when I hold the fabric in my hands and figure out how to sew the seams. I met Yvonne once, on the trip to France my mother was able to organize when I myself was fifteen years old. I was two years into my adolescent depression, I did not want to go to France. I shaved my head and smoked Gauloise cigarettes in the herb garden. The same garden my mother had played in as a child. I leaned against the brick wall crumbing with vines, and I took self conscious drags of poison, feeling bravely and self-consciously adult. My great-uncle had just called me a “herrison”, which means hedgehog. I didn’t really mind though, I was more embarassed that I had been bitten by his ferocious ferrets. I used my cloud of smoke to veil myself in the privacy of the garden, and to take a moment to feel the space.
I anchored France in my heart, through a cigarette in a garden. I stood on the ground. I rested in the shade. I was very far from home.
