100 Drawings / A Confessional
This was a collaborative project with Sylvie Toutain in 2017. We explored the full potential of the drawn surface to veraciously express and confess our innermost feelings, memories, regrets and fears. We did this through conversation and practice exploring candidly some of the issues facing women in middle age. We made an effort to understand how our memories are retained and how they influence us and our work. Through this abundant, challenging and deep interrogation the project aimed to create an aggregation of admissions and disclosures, a haptic process that reprogrammed our own DNA as we worked on them.
The final show was exhibited in The Tannery Arts Project space where I installed the 50 drawings we each had produced, opposite each other, as if they were 2 women in deep conversation. Beneath the viewers feet I installed a patchwork carpet made up of remnants I had sourced from a large warehouse. They miraculously included patterns that were incredibly powerful at triggering memories from the viewers. They were patterns we would have all seen growing up in Nan’s lounge or the pub etc.
I also had a perfumier create ‘Scent of Nan’s handbag’ - smoke / wax / leather / soap / floral / urine - which I sprayed onto the carpet intermittently to provoke an olfactory memory response in the viewers.