"Patch Work"

[fiefoe]

Claire Wilcox's memoir reads just like what the book title promised. Love the bits on her experience at the V&A textile department.

• When we acquire, we say it is in perpetuity, like a sacred bond between building and object, holder and held. So it is on one level. Sorted, categorised, catalogued, numbered, the collective collections represent the gathering together of excellence; of history, taste and skill. We are caring for high-quality detritus of the past in order to understand who we are.
• We treat the objects with kid gloves, avoiding sudden movement, and think through the steps we take from cupboard to table as, for example, we airlift a massive crinoline weak with age. We settle its folds, form rolls of tissue to support its boned struts, and pass our hands over the creases like mediums intent on resurrecting the dead.
• Our language is frequently of devastation and disintegration. We talk of shattered silks – when the brittle fabric splits, often down an old crease; fugitive dyes that have faded through time
• bags are such a mystery, they always arrive in the museum cleared out, as if absolved of personality.
• We know that for each fretted, painted and beribboned fan in our possession, a million will have been lost, as they swirled around house clearances, vintage stores and salerooms, with only the best and rarest finding refuge in the museum, like exhausted migratory birds.
• We trust the thousand sensors in our fingertips to authenticate and explore the dresses through touch: the tiny ridge where a dressmaker’s pin has been left in a hem; the slightest textural change where a seam has been altered; the presence of dirt trapped in a cuff that will damage (for dirt particles are sharp); the weight of quality in a dress that spurs us on to keep searching for an haute couture label (often hidden in the folds to avoid export tax).
• My mother was quick and efficient, the iron going in every direction and hissing with steam. She had been taught laundry work at school, learning how to starch collars and warm the cast irons on the stove, and how to use a goffering iron for frills and flounces.
• He would have talked me up; he was proud of my cleverness but puzzled by my diffidence. I was egotistically shy.
• Knowing we might never go back, I bought a dress. I longed for it because its heavy, embroidered yoke and mirrored scales seemed like a breastplate for our time.
• He hath awaken’d from the dream of life, Jagger read from Shelley’s Adonais, stumbling slightly over the words. I especially liked the line Life, like a dome of many-colour’d glass; it reminded me of a Venetian glass paperweight.
• in its heyday lace was an economic miracle, weight for weight, thread for thread; more valuable than gold.
• Once, a box of medieval leather shoes arrived. We were all sent home, and a specialist wearing a white boiler suit and mask had to be called in to isolate the shoes, in case they came from a plague pit.
• The smell of naphthalene pervaded the air as we checked through a cluster of medieval caps. Lots of these had been found in London, as ever-taller buildings required ever-deeper excavations. The felted wool was designed to be warm and waterproof and, although the caps were hundreds of years old, looked as if it still might be.
• One young man was rich and pampered; he folded his shirt, and his underpants were snowy white. I think he thought I was an adventure.
• The Keeper believed in tacit experience and we learnt without realising it. She asked me to unpick a lace collar that had been stitched onto a faded backboard. I used a scalpel to slice through the threads, and when the lace was released, a shadow collar had been imprinted onto the blue velvet like a daguerreotype. This was a lesson in light damage.
• I was, in the end, pulled back by a silver thread, by a sea change at the museum, a lightening of the galleries, a cleaning of the cases, an efflorescence of excitement about the possibility of fashioning the gap between the sweat of the studio and the serenity of the storeroom. I imagined a blurring of the senses, artistry in movement, redefining what a museum could be, patching order to the chaos of making; for everything that had ever been carved, gilded, chipped, woven or embroidered had felt the sweat of the hand and the mess and noise of the workshop; the irrational investment of the artist and the expert.
• Some of the drawings were cautious, dark with reworkings; others sketchy, approximate, dotted and dashed. I complimented someone on their work; liked the way they had rendered the folds of the drapery, observed the curve of my spine in repose, noted the fineness of my ankles, marked the swell of my stomach, implied the weight of my breasts.
• when it was night, a kind stranger came home and said did you see the moon. I missed it. I was thinking instead of our lost child and wondering where his memorial was, and how on earth we were to locate our grief.
• The cool, salty air swept in from the Atlantic, ruffling the grasses on the dunes and flapping the washing and blowing the curls from her brow as we walked along the deserted beach, with its sweeping ribbon of sand edged with waves of lace.
• I washed and ironed them, knowing it really was the last time, and we polished their red shoes until they gleamed. The girls were briefly interested, less so than we had thought: our attachment to their baby clothes, without them inside, seemed inappropriate, as if we’d got the wrong idea of love.
• The Delphos gowns: The dresses were formed from narrow lengths of the finest Japanese silk, hand-stitched together and then pleated into rills like the delicate underside of a field mushroom through a mysterious process involving heat, ceramic rollers and water, to create a shimmering, clinging tube of impossible lightness and loveliness that pooled at the feet and that was Grecian in both form and intent.
• Opacity and opalescence collided, heaviness and weightlessness took on new properties, exchanged attributes – resulting in the framework of clothing expanding to take on unusual forms, unseen-before silhouettes, raw edges, with tacking stitches left in, a no-fit philosophy, throwing emphasis on form and drape, and proposing that the space between the body and the cloth was as important as any external carapace;
• I read Let me not to the marriage of true minds, speaking for them both. I did not know that, when Shakespeare wrote of love: It is the star to every wandering bark, bark meant boat, until my father told me.
• Our house settled into a baffled silence. The furniture had the effect of confusing me too, overlaying my life with theirs like a double exposure, so that when I came down in the morning I didn’t know where I was.
• In the photographs, of which there are many – for Kahlo had a magnetically compelling visage and an ability to look straight through the camera to the viewer’s eye – it is evident that she was a gift for photographers, including her father, who documented his favourite daughter throughout her childhood and early adulthood with the careful objectivity of love, and her lover, Nikolas Muray, whose technically magnificent colour carbro portraits made us fall for her too.
• The corsets, like the paintings, are an X-ray into her preoccupations: communism, in the form of a hammer and sickle; pain, shown as the torture of a spine depicted as a crumbling column; childlessness, for one has a delicately painted unborn child over the abdomen, the image taken from an illustrated obstetrics manual. She dealt with loss by studying it and by painting it,
• The sky’s indifferent grandeur made it impossible to take a bad photograph;
• Night falls. The trees stand rigid, skeletal against the hemisphere, as a slow wash of blue passes over and the low clouds suffuse first pink, then blood-red. I turn the light on and lock the door, waterlogged with memory.
• the other is about water, but I’m unable to say why. Although I know how. I’d flood the vitrines of the museum, illuminate them with flickering sunlight, submerge the muslins and the silks and watch them circle, their lacy cuffs and collars slowly pulsing in time.
• how Matthew Arnold compared the sparkling waves to the folds of a bright girdle, as if the sea’s embrace was holding the land together. He, too, was a watcher and knew his seabirds well.
• for I was unproductive in my travels, unable to use the hours other than regretfully observe them pass, like empty cars on a carousel.
• These skies were the gift at the end of the journey. Framed by the window in the flat-gabled B&B – without the view it would perhaps be unacceptable, although we liked its ramshackle ways – they performed their slow successions in an exquisite dalliance between light, vapour and seaborne winds.
• where I cycled to college on a stolen bike and felt something like happiness unfurl. Aloneness detached itself from loneliness as if the twinning had been a misunderstanding.
• for tea was so costly it was locked in mahogany boxes lined with silver foil to keep it fresh and sipped from tiny bowls like this. I unwrap the tea bowl from its bed of tissue, put my lips to the rim, perhaps the first person ever to do so, and shudder at the impossibility of use. Yet, as my poet friend says, what life for such things without that one life-giving thing – the possibility of breaking?
• And before that, the building shuddering with the sound of artillery shells and sirens, and shrapnel pitting the stone walls and impaling the red telephone box that still stands outside like a sentinel; and galleries being bricked in because the altarpieces were too big to move; and curators watching as their assets were carried away by horse and cart to be stacked on the platforms of Aldwych Station, or hauled off in army trucks to faraway Welsh mines.
• a blackbird abruptly sings out against the closing of the light, as one did at the graveside, I think of Emily Dickinson’s words of outrage, a Bird/Defrauded of its Song, and the irreconcilability of birth and death being as one, and the fused words that so concisely state their case: stillborn (first used in 1593 – perhaps before then it wasn’t worth commenting on). It’s been a three-decade goodbye, the cargo of grief abutting joy, the compilation and counting of objects, the mosaic of words and thoughts, the arranging of pebbles around my pond; the lost scent of flowers, the threads between places, the love of children, my long-time friend, the light-filled rooms, the garden at dusk, the quiet archives, my bridge and my river, the end of one story and the beginning of another; a patch-work life, perhaps.