Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette, Bonney

Six bespoke artist’s books make up Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette, Bonney and attest to the 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 – as testimonial to their revelations, which then came to represent my account of their recounting. One small stick, one silver spoon, one large seed, and three popular sweets (described as lollies).

The books, unorthodox artefact and heirloom, bring Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette, and Bonney’s pasts to the present, accompanied by faint traces of my own past – their telling and my listening merging. Sixteen black and white photographs – four images presented with differing emphases and highlights generated through the four colour separation process are presented at the beginning of each book. They allude to the ways recollection can shift focus, some details sharp and clear in one retelling but perhaps not so in the next. A personal letter and an object sit either side of the photographs.

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 I developed for looked after children in collaboration with the Foundling Museum, London when it reopened in 2005. It is where I 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. It ceased providing residential care in 1970.

In 2008, Artquest, London and Parramatta Artists’ Studios, Sydney initiated their international residency exchange programme, and I became inaugural recipient alongside painter, John Spiteri. My residency developed into a sites of memory project after discovering that as well as Burnside Museum other local historic buildings had also once been children’s homes: Lynwood Hall, Parramatta Girls’ Home and The Female Orphan School. These ‘finds’ and reading Nobody’s Child by journalist Kate Adie (on my outbound journey to Australia) catalysed ideas for Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette, Bonney. The book magnifies the role women have as keepers of the family while exposing the stigma unmarried mothers have endured throughout history. Rejoining the buildings with past residents began to feel important and so I very intentionally set about locating women who had lived in these homes when they were girls.

Copyright © Maria Amidu, 2011