Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette, Bonney
2011Six bespoke artist’s books make up Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette, Bonney and attest to time I spent with six women who were raised in the care system in and around Parramatta, Sydney. My intention for this project was not to make a documentary work but rather to create something to symbolise how place mediates memory, to consider what might be generated if memories are shared with someone who knows the experience but not the place.
I invited Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette and Bonney to each meet me at the institutional home they had lived in during childhood. We walked, they talked, I listened. After each walk, once each woman had left, I lingered, retracing steps, taking photographs, gathering small, innocuous objects – testimonials to their revelations which also came to represent my recounting of their recounting.
The books – unorthodox artefact and heirloom – pull Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette, and Bonney’s past to the present, bringing a shadow of my own past along with them. My listening merging with their telling. Each book is made up of four black and white photographs presented four times – with differing emphases and highlights generated through the colour separation process used in screen printing. Each set of sixteen images suggests versions of a story, alluding to ways in which recollection can shift focus, some details sharp and clear in one retelling but perhaps not so in the next. A personal letter and my retrieved objects sit at the front and back of each book respectively. One small stick, one, silver spoon, one seed, and three popular sweets (described as lollies).
I made Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette, Bonney some years after my time in Australia, reasoning that being entrusted with such heartfelt disclosure required reciprocity and time – something less exposed. Three years after first meeting them I sent Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette and Bonney their bespoke books through the mail. The work has never been exhibited, and there are no duplicates.
Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette, Bonney evolved after a project Maria developed for looked after children in collaboration with the Foundling Museum, London when it reopened in 2005. It is where she was introduced to Burnside Museum, Parramatta – a private collection and archive documenting the history of Burnside village, an estate built in 1911 by Scottish emigrant Sir James Burns to house orphaned children, ceasing residential care in 1970. In 2008, Artquest and Parramatta Artists’ Studios initiated their international residency programme, and Maria became inaugural recipient alongside painter, John Spiteri. The residency began at the Burnside Museum, leading her to other historic buildings which were also once children’s homes: Lynwood Hall, Parramatta Girls’ Home and The Female Orphan School. These ‘finds’, and her reading of Nobody’s Child by Kate Adie provoked an interest in connecting the buildings to past children, and Maria endeavoured to connect with women who once lived in these places (apart from The Female Orphan School as there was no one with a living memory of it left to speak to).
Copyright © Maria Amidu, 2011