A walk around my grandmother's house
- kimbalbumstead
- Sep 22, 2019
- 2 min read
This was a performance installation that I did in 2013 for the "Draw to perform" symposium at ]Performance S p a c e[ in London. My grandmother had always been a kind of mysterious character to me, having never really known her well. At the time of the performance she had recently moved to a nursing home and consequently had to leave her house behind and most of her possessions, knowing that she would not be able to take them to the new place. I felt moved by this process of letting go of a lifetime worth of things, and the fact that she took with her only a handful of photographs. I wanted to mark this moment of transition and also to preserve something of it somehow, especially to examine my own relationship to it. After she moved out, I went to her house to make a journey around it, a sort of pilgrimage and a way of saying goodbye a place that I would unlikely ever see again after the house would be sold, but also as a journey of discovery to try to piece together fragmented memories of being there as a child and to look at the photographs that she left behind. My grandmother passed away in 2019.
Visitors to the "Draw to perform" symposium were invited to phone me while I was making this journey around the house, to listen to me describing and telling stories about objects, letters and photographs that I found along the way. There was a little table set up with a pad of paper, pens, and a mobile phone with my number in it as the only contact. I asked the visitors to make a drawing of what I was describing, whist wearing a blindfold - thereby concentrating on the story rather than the picture. The resulting drawings became little fragments of the exploration, fragments of fragmented memories.
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