How much is in a tale

We're on the search for memory prompts to serve as reminiscence aids for the project Making Memories. The sheer physicality of an object (a rolling pin, a potty, a toy car, a perfume bottle, a teapot, a spigot, a bob-chaser, a doozie...) is a powerful tool. Just as taste can prompt remembering, a la Proust, so can touch, smell, weight. One of the best gadgets we've discovered in this respect is a pile of books.

Collection of Beatrix Potter's Books 

Lois and I brought books from our collections this morning to Shaw Side, Residential and Nursing Home, we worked with people who have a dementia diagnosis. The table was piled with a diverse set: illustrated children's books both old and modern, Pooh, Alice, Peter Rabbit and assorted chums, an atlas, the Observer Book of Flowers, the Observer Book of Planes, a “Cyclopaedia”, a rhyming dictionary of my Dad's and a venerable book of Keats' poems.

Lois had prepared some outsize library cards as templates for people to write/draw into and we'd a stock of creative writing exercises in our back pockets. This felt risky because dementia can incapacitate folk very cruelly – language dexterity suffers, for example - and we didn't want to over-tax or embarrass anyone. But conversely we didn't want to underestimate people either. So, the paper and pens were around as an option if anyone wanted to take it (most didn't) and meanwhile I wrote down their observations as material for a group poem.

Page from The Observer Book of Planes

What became apparent was that all the people around the table were capable of entering the world that these books opened into. Even if it was with faltering steps, they went right on in. The illustrations were a key, the sumptuous colours of the plates in the illustrated Alice in Wonderland, the exquisite Beatrix Potter artworks, the heart-warming cheeriness of Winnie the Pooh. All of these caused delight, amusement and even wonder. An ex-seamstress marvelled at the embroidery-like detail in Beatrix Potter. And a model aeroplane enthusiast worked slowly through the Observer Book of Planes, before passing it onto the ex-WAAF veteran sitting next to him. The woman next to me gasped audibly at the autumn colours on a page of Winnie the Pooh.

Lois's childhood copy of The World of Pooh

But the language too held a fascination, people picked key phrases or words and rolled them around their mouths, savouring them. One of my neighbours went into a long, detailed reverie about the meaning of storytelling. Her language was scattered and diffuse to my ears, but she spoke with her own precision and the power of it pulled me in. She ended with: “It's a big thing, how much is in a tale...”

Books are not just made of words. They have a powerful physical authority and they bring a huge number of associations to mind, good and bad. The words within are translations of the authors' raw experience into language and the reader re-translates them into various sorts of understanding. That understanding is a gift of the reader to the reader and it occurs within them; it is their possession and it cannot finally be measured or judged except by them. What was so moving today was to see that the pleasure given by a book can exist in a place where understanding sometimes seems very far away.

Atlas dating from 1933

IN OUR BACK POCKETS

Responding to books

Hold a book – guess what's in it without opening it. Make up your own story for it.

Open a book and sniff the pages – what does the smell remind you of?

Draw around a book, then another and another, until you have a cluster of rectangles; give it a title.

Exercises, to be written onto library cards

Categorise your favourite book, replacing the name of the author with your own name, the Dewey number with your date of birth and summaris the story in no more than 20 words.

Write the first line of an invented story on the card, spreading your words out across the whole card, hopping between lines and using the gaps between the words to illustrate the story in some way.

Decorate a library card to be the front cover of a favourite book.

If there was a library of your childhood what would be the titles of ten of the books?

Make a story using at least one word that rhymes with 'book' in each sentence.

Tut, tut, child!  said the Duchess. Every thing's got a moral, if only you can find it

Asleep in the dark wood

The dark forest or wood, is a symbol that haunts human beings - from fairy tales to horror films we go into the darkness to encounter fear and perhaps to overcome it. This is the way that we grow up and become fully ourselves, by facing fears, demons, addictions, enemies without or within. The means to challenge and disperse one's particular fears is something that we only can discover individually, but because humans are emotionally similar we can learn from the experience of others, be they Hansel and Gretel or King Arthur, Dante or Dostoyevsky, whoever. The way that some of these experiences are passed on is through the strange fabrics of storytelling, poetry, art.

The exhibition The Dark Would, which I've just curated at Summerhall in Edinburgh, brings together poets and artists who take us into the heart of the Dark Wood, as the poet Dante called it. These are pieces that look at the confusions and difficulties of being alive, balancing that with  beauty - and perhaps too, very subtly, with ways out.

a quilt for when you are homeless

I now want to “walk” you through this exhibition, because it hinges on an arthur+martha piece and many followers of this blog won't be able to visit in person.

The central piece is a quilt that is hand stitched by homeless people from Manchester (helped by embroidery students and members of the WI) describing fragments of their lives. It was made during an arthur+martha project last year called 'the warm /&/ the cold'; the piece itself is titled 'a quilt for when you are homeless'. The making of this quilt is detailed elsewhere on the arthur+martha blog; it was a long process constructing this modest-looking piece, the work of many hands and much life experience. Much of the work occurred at The Booth Centre and The Big Issue in the North offices in Manchester. The quilt is a series of life story fragments from a much longer piece, which we are editing into a book called ALBION, funded by the NALD.

After Henry James, by Tom Phillips; on shelf, THE DARK WOULD language art anthology, at Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2013 

In the main exhibition space at Summerhall, the quilt is spot-lit, and around it are satellites, other works also picked out of the dark by intense lights. I've put stuffing under the quilt, so that it looks as though there's someone sleeping beneath it. Around this imagined person are dilemmas and difficulties that we sometimes face, leading away like myriad possibilities. We see works about madness, rape, war, repression (by Tom Phillips, Caroline Bergvall, Simon Patterson) but also gentleness, love, humour, art (father and son Alec Finlay, Ian Hamilton Finlay, then Richard Wentworth, Maria Chevska). To my mind these pieces are speaking to each other. Here's the revolutionary thinker Guy Debord represented by two posters from the 1968 student uprising in Paris, in dialogue with Ian Hamilton Finlay about insurrection; in the next room along are pieces by Lawrence Weiner, Fiona Banner and Jenny Holzer which, all put together, make connections between male sexuality, power and war.

On the ground floor of the gallery we find work by Jenny Holzer, Mallarme, Richard Long, Sarah Sanders, Robert Fitterman, Tony Trehy and Laurence Lane (among many others) all of which touch on the places where we are rawest and most human. You can see shots of the exhibition and read more about it elsewhere in FLUX magazine,The Herald, Summerhall TV and other sites.

However, the two pieces I'd finally like to mention here both link back to arthur+martha again. The first is Holocaust Museum by Robert Fitterman the delicacy of which chimes with our own project involving Holocaust survivors, Kindness. Fitterman's piece takes the text from all of the photo-captions in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and simply reproduces them as a long "found" poem. The poem has been printed on A4 pages and pinned to the walls of an office room adjacent to the gallery.

The last room - and most uplifting, I find - contains two textworks by Richard Long. They were made by Long over twenty years apart, at very different times of his life. He suggested that I pair them. They are both circular and both describe going for walks in the outdoors. In a way they're tiny globes. They are in a long, bright room and the light changes subtly as you move from one end to the other, from cold to warm. The room has a soundtrack of schoolchildren impersonating birdsong, a recording that Lois and I made during an arthur+martha session at a school in Derbyshire, during a silly and joyous afternoon. They give the space that very underrated thing, a happy ending.   

I would particularly like to thank ACE for funding this project, all of the project participants from The Booth Centre, The Big Issue in the North and The Red Door, whose work and words made the quilt.

The Dark Would exhibition continues at Summerhall until 24 January 2013.

a quilt for when you are homeless

have your cake and eat it too

Last weeks session for the project Making Memories, was all about the fine art of cake eating... The Great British performance surrounding afternoon tea; the three tiered cake stands, smartly uniformed waitresses, fancy sandwiches with the crusts cut off, warm homemade scones...

We were working with older people the majority whom had some form of dementia, so even more than normal activities and expectations, had to match the needs of the person joining in. 'Keeping occupied and stimulated can improve quality of life for the person with dementia, as well as those around them. Activities can act as an opportunity for fun and playfulness. They can also encourage independence, social inclusion, communication or expression of feelings.' The Alzheimer's Society.

In the memory box this week, I used a range of different prompts to stimulate reminiscence and creativity, photos of afternoon tea, vintage photos of tea rooms, various cakes to taste, smell and look at, cake stands and plates. 

In between cake eating and tea drinking we reminisced around the subject:

Special occasions, a nice hot drink 

little fancy cakes, a big house 

cup of tea, a nice cup of tea in the morning

sandwiches, little fancy ones

a cup of tea for tea

ham, cucumber

cut it in slices

a nice cup of tea

turkey, salmon and cucumber

egg and cress

couldn't afford posh cakes

would make them, not fancy ones

pies everyday things

winberry pie, girls go picking

a nice summer day

Betty's tearoom tea hot water a separate pot

tiny sandwiches, tiny cakes, little scones

tea and cake at the church

I like a nice cup of tea in the morning...

tablecloth, napkins

the people around you

like the old times

like the old times

shouting hot cross buns

Drawings themed on cakes, and lines of reminiscence where drawn onto cardboard three tiered cake stands. These have been left with the care homes to work on during the week, giving our group another go, and new people opportunities to join in with the activity. I look forward to seeing the final results.

Thank you that was very pleasant

We're working in partnership with Gallery Oldham to help rethink their reminiscence boxes as tools to stimulate art, writing and shared reflection.

We’ve recently started working in two care homes in Oldham, trying creative reminiscence ideas. Working with people with a dementia diagnosis, we're on the lookout for subtle breakthroughs, which mean an approach has worked and someone has changed their behavior for awhile. This is the story of one such moment.

The Big Wheel, Blackpool

The Big Wheel, Blackpool, Carbon Print

The reminiscence box we are currently constructing is called High Days and Holidays. It’s a powerful memory jolt because it brings with it associations of family outings, religious festivals, days out of the day-to-day. One of the slightest and yet most affecting things in this box is a set of old handtinted photos of Blackpool, the Shangri La of the North West. People were invited to trace these images with a pencil, onto carbon paper, making a copy of their marks. The drawings that came from this session have a dreamy beauty.

To make such a piece requires much effort, especially if you happen to have a dementia diagnosis. You have to recognize the picture, enter it, select the most important details, physically inscribe it with your own human labour.

A lady in our group today sings almost constantly, it’s a circle of behavior she rarely breaks out of. We of course didn’t know this. We simply saw a woman who sang a lot when we first met her become engrossed in drawing.

It turns out this was the first time she’d picked up a pencil and signed her name in two years, when her carer didn’t know if she could even write. It turns out she was a professional singer, and often worked in Blackpool.

It’s very tempting to make this last fact a neat ending to this story, because it appeals to logic. She was a singer in Blackpool – aha! 

I don't trust neat endings. Perhaps it was the rhythm of the physical activity, perhaps it was the particular colour of the picture, perhaps it was simply the daftness of our idea that appealed? But she stopped singing and we all kept smiling.

Tower Circus, Carbon Print

THE DARK WOULD: language art exhibition World Premiere

7th December - 24th January at Summerhall , Edinburgh

Launch (open to public) 7pm, Friday 6 Dec 2013

Venue: Summerhall, Edinburgh, EH9 1PL

Entry: Free 

World-leading poets and text artists exhibit works that cross the boundary of living and dying in The Dark Would: Fiona Banner, Richard Long, Simon Patterson, Susan Hiller, Tony Lopez, Sarah Sanders, Jenny Holzer, Richard Wentworth, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Baum, Ron Silliman and many others, including outsider artists. 

Summerhall and its Curator Paul Robertson are proud to host the world premiere of this ground-breaking exhibition, which has been curated by poet Philip Davenport.

Davenport says: "This is an extraordinary gathering that asks what it is to have a body and to lose it. Perhaps this is best done by people for whom language is itself a state of in-between-ness… artists who use language and poets who are artists. Here, the material of language is used as a metaphor for human material, our own bodies, our little lives. Whether poets or homeless people, outsiders or art stars - we all have to find our way through the dark.”

a quilt for when you are homeless (2012) denim quilt embroidered by homeless people, an arthur+martha project

A centre-piece of the exhibition is an arthur+martha piece: the quilt embroidered by homeless people in Manchester with fragments of their life stories, 2012. The Laurence Lane piece Uptight (2012) uses the iconography of rock and roll to describe a schizophrenic episode. New work has been made especially for the show by Richard Wentworth and commissioned pieces include Rorschach drawings by Mike Chavez-Dawson, made from the names of dead poets and live writing by Sarah Sanders. 

Uptight (2011) by Laurence Lane, unframed print

The Dark Would will also have 'answering' works by dead artists and poets including Stephane Mallarme, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Joseph Beuys, taken from Paul Robertson's Heart Fine Art collection which is based at Summerhall. For more information on Heart Fine Art: www.heartfineart.com

SING/WILD/KIND/WOOD (2012) by Alec Finlay 

The Dark Would exhibition is an out-growth of the large same-title anthology of language art, edited by Davenport and published by Apple Pie Editions 2013.

Exhibition contributors: arthur+martha, Fiona Banner, Erica Baum, Caroline Bergvall, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Maria Chevska, Matt Dalby, Philip Davenport, Steve Emmerson, Alec Finlay, Rob Fitterman, Steve Giasson, Susan Hiller, Jenny Holzer, Marton Koppany, Laurence Lane, Richard Long, Tony Lopez, Darren Marsh, Simon Patterson, Tom Phillips, Sarah Sanders, Ron Silliman, Carolyn Thompson, Tony Trehy, Carol Watts, Lawrence Weiner and Richard Wentworth.

that which made me what I am now

This long piece is one of the poems written (and edited) by a participant in our project in Oldham which ties reminiscence to everyday objects, for the project Making Memories. This particular poem is paired with a tavitho, which is rather like a fish slice and is used for frying. The poem is centred around a favourite arthur+martha subject: food and the eating thereof. 

that which made me what I am now

born Mombasa, then

trouble in Kenya, father concerned

six years old went back to India

studied in India 'til 21, BA in English and Sanskrit

dad thought “Daughters should stand on their feet.”

proud, self-confident

can-do

that which made me what I am now

but before that

when I was eight, older sister teaching:

“This is how you make chappati,

you roll it and you roast it, easy.”

We rolled all mis-shapes, couldn't show it to sister:

“We can't show this chappati!”

So we put ghee on and ate it

- did five or six like this, dipped in ghee.

Ate our mistakes, delicious!

By the time I was ten, could make perfect chappatis

made chappatis everyday, all my life

with my eyes closed

but my BA is English and Sanskrit.

For pudding, puranpurri

a little chappati stuffed with sweet lentils

lentils in sugar and lots of ghee, I love it

I cook the best

very old, old, old-

fashioned food, passed from memory

and fill it with

(you know, puran means stuffing?)

lentils, sugar, cardamon, little bit saffron

a little ball of ghee – ah, puranpurri

–  taste and memory

of long ago times, farm people working hard

sweat out the ghee

work the fields and house, hard hands

milk cows, churn yoghurt, sweeping hard

round tava pan for the chappati

to flip it, a slice we call tavitho

until

Father saying, “We are going to England.”

Excitement, disappointment

of leaving friends, families

sadness to say goodbye

to say goodbye

people give you a feast

family and friend, sweet dish, savoury

the feast at one house, at many

“Maybe this is the last feast we are having together.”

Puranpurri pudding

that which made me

a little chapatti stuffed with

memory

I love it.

Surajata Agravat

October 2013

Hindu Temple, Oldham

Lakshmi

This long piece is one of the poems written (and edited) by a participant in our project Making Memories in Oldham which ties reminiscence to everyday objects. This particular poem is paired with a divo, a light. The poem shares the same title as the goddess Lakshmi who brings luck and protests her devotees from sorrows, especially of the money-related sort. 

Lakshmi

when she grows, she goes

your daughter is never your own

given away in a wedding song

a little lamp

made of cotton raman divo

in Gujarati

they walk away with the lamp

daughter and groom

girl in front

mother passes the light to mother-in-law

when she grows she goes

a daughter is never yours

you'll give her away

raised for someone else

mother will pass the lamp

“Have brightness in yr new house”

a sad song at the end of the wedding

when your girl says goodbye.

Go and visit your parents

but you'll never be a little girl again.

Play it at weddings

you have to change with time and living

because home is where you are, not where you originate

what we teach is

light

at the end of the the wedding

the raman divo

passed from the girl's family to the boy's

a happy, sentimental moment

when a daughter is born she never belongs

to her father for long

given to her husband's family

there's a song in ours that puts it inside that

a reminder to the dad:

sasreye jata jojo papan na bhinjay,

dikari to parki thapan kahevay

means your daughter was never yours

don't show your tears

she was never yours from the start.

The song's finished, married and pregnant

at the month of seven we say shrimant

a blessing

for the child in the future;

now the baby comes

after fifteen days have a bath, wash everything

but you wouldn't come to temple

after forty days bring your child there

for blessing

when she grows, she goes

your daughter is never your own

given away in a song

people want sons to carry their name

but when a girl is born they say

we are wealthy in luck

lukshima is born, goddess

luck will look after us

ah, but luck

she was never ours from the start.

Anonymous

October 2013

Hindu Temple, Oldham