05 Silk Shawl

Silk Shawl 2004
Bronze h31 x w27 x d30 cm

In the summer of 1999, I returned to Suffolk from Hamburg with my three young children.  My marriage had come to an abrupt end, quickly followed by a divorce.  My own and my children’s lives had been turned upside down.

Now we had to find some way of moving on through the hurt and fear of a future that had suddenly become uncertain.

I could see my children were feeling lost.  I felt lost too.  My self-confidence was at zero and I felt very broken.  Rejection is a painful emotion to come to terms with.  I was fortunate in that I had my three young children with me;  who I love to bits; my family who stood beside me and friends who kept in touch.  After five years of expat life, moving from city to city, we were all in need of some stability.  My children started their new lives in local schools (hopefully the last ones for a while) and I could see I needed to go to school too, so I signed up to a Fine Art degree and followed this by learning to cast in bronze at Butley Mills Studios.  At that time, I felt that keeping busy was very necessary.

Moving on to 2004.  What to do with this life-changing experience and its most profound lesson: the realisation it is impossible to completely know someone?  Five years prior, the person I’d thought I knew inside and out, the person I’d married, had become utterly strange to me; someone I barely recognised.

I decided to create a head to further explore and hopefully express this concept.  Not just any old head mind, somehow it had to be disguised, the face and eyes concealed.  This meant it had to be wrapped, hidden.  I chose a very beautiful, colourful silk shawl which I’d bought on my honeymoon in Egypt and wrapped it around a roughly-hewn head-shaped central core.  This wrapped head then went through the various steps to become bronze.

It was a big surprise to see how the casting process had transformed my original idea, imbuing it with all the properties of bronze.  My soft, colourful silk shawl was now hard and cold.  Elements of its beauty remained however.  To my delight, the process had captured the wonderful weft and warp texture, the tassels and the folds.  Yet the dark void where the eyes should have been portrayed something far more sinister.