Geevor hankies
My father was a mining engineer, which meant I spent my childhood in the Derbyshire Peak District intrigued by the underground. There was a mineshaft in our back garden and another up the hill. I went underground with my father when I was researching the environment I grew up in for a body of work in the mid 1990’s. I also flew over it in a glider the same day. These experiences have shown up in my work repeatedly over the years.
In 2003, when I was investigating Infrasense as a notion, I was filming at Levant Mine and my father told me about his work experience from London’s Royal School of Mines, at Geevor Mine, in 1941. He looked out his project and sent it to me, I returned it later. After his death in 2008 I asked my mother for the project as I knew I would make some work with it one day, she told me she thought she had shredded it! I found it again when we cleared her house after she had moved into residential care, the year before she died. A year or so later I reached into a pot on a shelf in my studio and pulled out nine white, carefully folded, cotton handkerchiefs that I had forgotten were there, they were my father’s and I had kept them thinking I might work with them one day. This was when I decided to bring the two things together. I settled on stitch as a method since they are textile objects and because it is a slow, meticulous process, reflecting my father’s slow and meticulous approach to life. I washed and ironed them first and realised the last time this had been done would have been by my mother’s hands.
In 2003, when I was investigating Infrasense as a notion, I was filming at Levant Mine and my father told me about his work experience from London’s Royal School of Mines, at Geevor Mine, in 1941. He looked out his project and sent it to me, I returned it later. After his death in 2008 I asked my mother for the project as I knew I would make some work with it one day, she told me she thought she had shredded it! I found it again when we cleared her house after she had moved into residential care, the year before she died. A year or so later I reached into a pot on a shelf in my studio and pulled out nine white, carefully folded, cotton handkerchiefs that I had forgotten were there, they were my father’s and I had kept them thinking I might work with them one day. This was when I decided to bring the two things together. I settled on stitch as a method since they are textile objects and because it is a slow, meticulous process, reflecting my father’s slow and meticulous approach to life. I washed and ironed them first and realised the last time this had been done would have been by my mother’s hands.
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