The background in the image ‘You guys!’ is the wallpaper that was on the walls of the room known as ‘the breakfast room’ in the house in which I did most of my growing up.
When we cleared out the house in 2019 three years after Mum died and after finally managing to sell it I brought away with me some rolls of wallpaper that were spare and left over in the house. This particular one was not on show in any of the rooms but could still be seen covering the walls inside a built-in cupboard in the breakfast room. It was a bit of a revelation when we cleared out all the old bits of china and crockery that was stored in there and the orange and yellow pattern came to light.
With these remains of the old rolls of paper and some carpet remnants left over from the upstairs landing, a striking Greek key pattern in navy and scarlet, I had attempted in the couple of years before working on ‘Palimpself’, to put together sections of the wallpapers and carpet in small pieces to make a wall panel that would be reminiscent of the house. My intention had been to make three the same, to keep one for myself and to gift the other two to my two older sisters so that we would all have the same piece hanging in our homes that would connect us to our parents’ house.
Trying to fathom a combination of these swatches when each bore such distinctive and brightly coloured patterns was challenging and I experienced two phases of engaging with them and making attempts to do so before giving up temporarily on this aim. The breakfast room wallpaper asserted itself when I was making the images for ‘Palimpself’ as a suitable background for the four men in their seventies’ large-collared shirts and swagger. The men were housed in a photograph taken by my Dad on one of his business trips abroad and found by me when going through his old photos looking for interesting images. The boldness of the pattern and the colours in this paper would convey, so went my thinking, something of their ability to put themselves across with ease to make a picture that might ‘jazz’ with the eyes, making the viewer confront this wallpaper pattern, which would have these men built into it.
As I played around with the outline drawing of the men and the scan of the paper, they came into the foreground and receded back into the support depending on which colours I chose to transform the oranges and yellows into. I found a way in which, when the figures of the men were placed in layers over the background, the place where the wallpaper filled their shirts and bodies flipped to contrasting blues and lilacs so that the pattern of the paper became the pattern of their shirts. The wallpaper background was as loud as the designs on their shirts so that they were part of the background of everyday life as well as shouting out from it that they were there, a bit like men in the seventies asserting their presence against a burgeoning second wave of feminism, trying to consolidate dominance against fears of being swallowed up.
In using elements in the images, which, when I look at them hold a strong emotional resonance for myself and putting them into combinations with drawings of figures or people cut from old photographs, some of which hold similarly powerful personal associations for me and others not, and taking them to the point where the image ‘works’ in some way, where I can say ‘c’est ça’, I am hoping that the reverberations inhering in the very personal elements will come through. I am trusting that the overall effect of the image to a viewer who does not share any of the specific connections to particular motifs, figures or patterns that I have, will be to allow that viewer to pick up somehow on a residual ‘charge’ gained from the personal investment I have put into the making of each image.
The images are fictions but their fabric contains aspects from my life.