Memory Lumps

Every year the staff in the University of Canberra Centre for Creative & Cultural Research ( UC CCCR) organise an exhibition to showcase their creative output. This year it’s at Belco Arts, and the theme is We Need to Talk, which ties in with a ongoing UC project in collaboration with Ulster University in Ireland, called Difficult Conversations:

We Need to Talk builds on, extends, and amplifies the ‘Difficult Conversations’ international symposium held in March 2022. This was a collaboration between the University of Canberra, Ulster University and the British Council, featuring exchanges between leading artists and researchers from Australia and Northern Ireland about complex topics, from reconciliation and truth telling in the context of colonialism, to polarising social and political issues.

For the last couple of years of these exhibitions I’ve been making artwork about my mother’s trauma-based early-onset dementia. The first piece was made in lockdown: a small, digitally-printed book of drawings called Remembering Herself (2021). Here’s some pages:

And then in 2022, after reading The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk (Penguin, 2014), I did a collaborative project with Sara Bowen and Rhonda Ayliffe, where we each made an artist book responding to the word/idea of LOSSED. My book was called DisRemembering, again about my mother, exploring the notion that forgetting is not necessarily a negative action.

Over the last year, Mum started knitting again. She learned to knit at an early age, and made us all jumpers for years, knitting through the endless sports matches and car trips that seem to come with being an army wife. She stopped knitting in her late 40s, when she became obsessed with family history, but last year (2022) Dad bought her a few balls of crap supermarket wool and gave her a mismatched pair of knitting needles and she took to it like a duck to water. She has the skill, but not the concentration, so she’ll knit weird shapes but with lots of interesting textures. I gave her some brightly variegated wool and it confused the hell out of her. When she listens to music, she knits like a boss. When she watches TV, she tends to stop, stare at her handiwork, then change direction, or cast off then restart. I’ve been experimenting with playlists and colours. When she finishes a piece and goes to bed, I’ll stash the finished piece away and let her start fresh the next day. She goes through phases: jumper sleeves, scarves that look like core samples, or a strange shape that repeats every few days.

So for this year’s exhibition, I’ve collated a number of Sandra’s knits, sometimes letting them just be themselves, or sometimes sewing them together. They have been hung in the gallery with fishing line, threaded onto long circular needles or large metal needles. Some have titles that suggest music: ‘Red Hot Dean Martin’, Dusty Springfield, ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’; others have titles that evoke her knitting habits: ‘Footy Jumper’ or ‘Arm-y Wife’. Here’s what they look like:

My friend Fiona is pointing to a shift in pattern on ‘Red Hot Dean Martin’ (Mum swoons when she sees or hears him). I love these pieces. They are a great example of body memory, because if she tries to think about what she’s doing, it all goes pear-shaped. If she is distracted by music, she can knit flawlessly for hours, and loves doing it.

I’m not sure what will come of this in terms of other research outputs, but experiencing this with her, along with my work mentoring trauma-affected Defence personnel, makes a clear case for the benefits of material creative practice — a practice with no pressure, no expectations, just busy hands doing something calm and enjoyable, to get yourself out of your own head.