Marian's Planet And The Nivea Ring

Residency Writing 1

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, my apologies there is a lot going on.

I have just been away on residency with Invisible Flock at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and decided to write about some other things for a change, and I made a lot images and experiments there.

I hope you enjoy this - here is the first piece and one of the images.

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Here she is in this vast landscape of potent scented cream, a sea which teeth may have been sunk into and the winds of her breath may have stirred.  I hate the smell, I always have, but love that she is still here in it, that she was here at all, and that this feels like a part of our love somehow.

You don’t have to touch this, but if you did, you would touch where her fingers last went to gather up her favourite face cream, to keep the skin on her face so soft. The last touch before she died, this is what you would feel.  Her daily ritual never extended much to the rest of her skin - I’m sure you might be able to relate – how much time do you give to looking after the skin on your face, versus the rest of the skin on your body? Even the skin on the back of your neck? Sometimes she would rub her legs too roughly annoyed by the drying itchy sensations, and she would pick at her arms sometimes as if something had happened to her overnight to which she had no clue and only blame. But I digress.    

Maybe, you can try to imagine the person that you don’t know here.  My mum, a woman then in her eighties, dragging her fingers through this thick white landscape up onto her thinning elegant fingers, some of it getting lodged underneath her splitting long nails, before dragging the rest of it around her cheeks, up over her eyes and forehead and down onto her neck, over and over again, like she was washing.  I always felt the Nivea grip was too strong for her delicate features, but I could never convince her to use a lighter cream.

It’s no surprise to me that there is a landscape here, a landscape always seems to appear inside something else.  Here is her planet out in the cosmos, a moon, a terrain, made by her, in collaboration with Nivea.  Just as there is a tide in the clouds when you fly above them and a measurable tide in a cup of tea, so a buoyant seascape appears here as well. 

Maybe I will print this three-dimensionally, but it would need to fill a room, a large round room. 

Can you imagine walking into this space and being confronted at eye level by this floating disk, as if you are in the artic or out in space?  You move around the edge as you look across the undulating field.   There is just enough room for you, but the walls are close, like the circular edge of the blue plastic Nivea pot – you are in the in-between space, so it’s a tight fit.  Maybe you might put on a VR headset and travel around this white world this way and you hear my voice as you move about saying these words.

Welcome.

The sky is clear tonight and what you can see is Marian’s Planet. She is my mum, although she’s not here anymore.

Please do feel free to move around, as you wish.

You might notice the Nivea Ring is circling her planet today.

And if you concentrate, you might be able to sense that Marian’s life is present here too.

To give her full earth name she is called Marian Doris Farr.

I am her daughter Ju Dawn Row Farr.

We welcome you this evening.

My warmest wishes to you as always, to you whom I don’t know.

Thank you for coming.