It’s been over twenty years since both my parents died within two years of each other. These days I think of them from time to time but no longer grieve them. My brother and myself were suddenly thrust into becoming the ‘elders’ of our families. It does get you thinking about legacies and the objects and artifacts you leave behind. Hence my urge to declutter!

My life as a visual artst began the year after my father died when I signed up for a TAFE art course in Wagaratta, Victoria.

One of our assignments was to create a series of works about ourselves, a type of biographical insight into who were were and what ingredients went into who we have become. We had to create using a limited palette and in a square format.

I chose to create square collages which possibly set the tone and style of much of subsequent artworks. After my parent’s home had been cleared out, I had a room full of plastic tubs which contained the residue of their lives and the objects they collected or cherished. They rarely threw things out!

My father defined himself by his work as a pharmacist running his own chemist shop for thirty years. My earliest memories of him were in a white chemist uniform standing at the pharmacy desk measuring out tablets and writing up the precriptions he dispensed in a leather bound book which I still have.

Memories of mum are tied up with the home, vases of flowers on the table and the embroidered handstitching done by my grandmother and great aunts. Mum’s legacy was a treasure trove of sewing boxes and paraphanalia, recipes handed down through the generations and a collection of knitting books, aged in all their vintage glory.

I unearthed the collages I made for TAFE from my archive of old artworks whilst I’ve been cleaning my studio. They still carry an emotional charge for me and I won’t be assigning these to the paper recycle bin. Here are the Memento Moris of my parents’ lives, commemorated as collages to remind me of my own mortality.

There is a pattern of symetry in each of these collages, many of which I have subconciously referenced in more recent works. I think of the collage I made referencing my father’s Scottish ancestry and the poem and drawing I did last year entitled A Calendonian Return. I can trace the seeds of this to the collaged photocopy mashup of images from my dad’s Scottish books and maps as well as a kilt pin my mother always wore on her tartan skirts.

I thought these archives were only for remembering what had gone before. However I am excited about the possibilities these suggest for new works. I learnt so much from tearing up a photocopied image of my father and reconfiguring it back to back.

My TAFE teacher of that time told me that your eye ‘knits’ the image together. It’s an interesting concept. To tear and deconstruct a face so that the eye reconfigures it back into shape. Blame it on the colour mixing experiments of the Impressionists, or the Surrealists’ dreamscapes and Picasso’s cubist faces of his wives and lovers. All of these have contributed to the way our eyes have learnt to ‘read’ images.

It’s one of the resons why I love collage. Torn papers become lines in a landscape and strange figures emerge from juxtaposing two seemingly disparate forms or figures. It’s a kind of multidimensional thinking that I’m attracted to. So many lives, so many stories lived simultaneously as artwork collages.