Family Album: 2994
2018
Artist bound books: photographs, silkscreen print, pencil, woven labels
This precious family album is a record of the walks Kath does with her children. Wearing her Waste dress, she traced the 2994 metres of her circular walk she does at least three times a week. It is a private record of something that is done very publicly. The book can travel too, or be left on a shelf for years unopened. It can be read by her whole family, or be ignored to gather dust. It suggests privilege too – education, knowledge, power.
The route was made it into a silkscreen print. One set of prints is a motif of the map repeated three times, the amount of times she walks this route a week. The other is an enlarged print. On each page she marked her home with a pencil cross, and a red cross where she was on the route. The X marking the spot is done by hand, each motif has a mark, again suggesting repetitive labour.
The woven labels are from a school labelling shop she uses for her children’s school uniforms.
Binding the book by hand was a meditative process and it is a record of how Kath can never be fully alone or autonomous. Her children are always with her. She carries them in her body as well as her emotions.
Family Albums: Waste
April 2018
Bookbinding cloth, greyboard, thread, black paper, nappy bag, lambswool, wipes
30 x 31 cm
A self-bound book containing stitched wipes, nappy bags and knitted lambswool.
A book to subvert the traditional family album which has highly curated photographs, and instead displaying wipes/bags/cloth which are discarded everyday.
Each stitched wipe page has a feeding time underneath. This is from a log of the feeding times of her first child’s first week. The circular, overlapped motif comes from exploring ideas of wear and tear on the mother’s body. Also Melaine Klein’s ideas of good/bad breast, the process through which the child emotionally separates from their mother by dividing her into a good / bad mother, hence coming to terms with an imperfect mother.