“What am I doing here?” July 12th 2018

Wrexham Maelor Residency Notes

12/7/2018

Evington Ward

“What am I doing here?”

Ticky and I went into a ward we have both worked on before. Mrs M was here, and since I met her last week, Ticky also met and worked with her- hearing tales of the river Dee. They had a really lovely chat about fishing the river, and Ticky wrote down some descriptions of memories, and some directions too- which are far more concise than my 2 hours of recorded conversation! (Note to self, learn to write faster and listen at the same time, to save on hours of transcription!)

Arriving in Evington, though, a very distressed lady in the ward had quickly spotted our new “artist in residence” t-shirts and we found ourselves at her bedside. She showed us a photograph of her mother which stood, pride of place, on her little table, and asked if we could paint her. She informed us that her mother had died last year, and sensing her distress we asked if she would like Ticky to draw her, and for me to do some writing. I wasn’t sure on her answer so instead of lugging a typewriter over I opted for a pen and pencil. I helped her to compose a letter to ask for an end to the estrangement of her family. She described to me her battles with alcoholism and we did all we could to appease her. After we completed the letter she seemed a lot calmer. She lay quietly in her bed and when I felt she had said all she had to say I left her to rest.

Mrs M was still here and she remembered us both. They were again talking about the river Dee. I am really keen to take some of these recollections and use them for some typewriter development. I have been making maps in my studio time already, using sentences as lines- and have kept to the roads as the linear dictators for the forms to follow. Ticky suggested using the river dialogue to form a moving line that would represent the river itself- and she thought it could be fun in our collaboration to combine text (me) and object (Ticky) together as an image. Mrs M described using a “fine thread on a bamboo cane” to catch fish, so in our development time we are going to investigate this line of enquiry.

Further to this, I invited Mrs M to have a go at my newly purchased fridge poetry. To begin with she was reserved; I was literally having to separate all the new words- but a word jumped out at her and she immediately got the hang of it, adjusting word suggestions and selecting some really visually stimulating language. As an educated woman, she had a great vocabulary and she wrote such a beautiful mournful piece:

Dream of memories

of a beautiful young woman

She is dancing

beneath the rainbow

With a twinkle in her eye

In the summer breeze