Current work
'The Little Girl Wants to be Heard'
When I was 16, my Grandmother Evelyn passed away.
My Father, was left with the task of clearing her house of all possessions and furniture, to enable a sale of the property.
The place began to transform into a shell of despair and denial.
My Father was an only child, and my Grandmother was his only true friend. His alcoholism has destroyed many of his
other friendships and relationships over the years.
In his grief, my father disposed of many things without a second thought. On my own visit to the house however,
my recognition of what my father was doing and becoming was heartbreaking, and as a teenager I could not understand.
I still remember the bin in the back garden overflowing, and it worried me to think how often this was happening.
Secretly, I salvaged a small amount of the discarded items, but i did not stop to look, I merely took what i had time to and
stashed it in the nearest carrier bag, without my Father knowing. To this day, my Father does not know i hold these items in
my own possession. As far as he knows, if he even remembers, they are gone forever.
Until now I have never looked at what i rescued. The pain of my loss and the anger at my father were too great.
Looking now, there is a broad selection of things that provoke a whole range of memories and emotions, many of which have
direct connections with either myself or my father.
The items that have the most impact on me however, are the ones that are ripped. This was not my grandmother's doing -
This was the work of my Father. As if merely throwing the items away was not a big enough statement,
he chose to destroy some of them.
On closer inspection of the ripped items, you can see from the individuality of each tear that each one was a conscious
decision. Many of the photographs he has ripped are either of himself from his youth, or of myself as a child.
These are the items I was most angry at my Father for, and I want to know why he chose to do this.
I am hoping that the exploration into these items of such a personal level will enable me to understand the reasoning behind
my father's ruthlessness, and perhaps even develop into a confrontation of my fragile relationship with him, stemming from his
poor choices of dealing with various situations of loss and pain.
I often wonder what my father would think of my exploration, whether he would see it as a brutal interrogation
and be insulted, or whether it would open his eyes to his actions, and to enable him to see the truth that the past is gone forever.
I also wish to know what compelled me to rescue these things. Perhaps I was trying to salvage some of the relationship
when I salvaged the items in the carrier bag.
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