Pieces of Eight 

A personal assemblage – an autobiography in bottles, boxes and story fragments.

This large, complex piece is housed within an artist’s watercolour box. Its title, Pieces of Eight, refers to my family – myself and my six children made eight in total.

The work unfolds in a spiral. It begins at the top right corner with a greenish round box and is read anti-clockwise, ending with a stack of thin handmade paper sheets, created from plants in my garden. The left side of the box follows a similar spiral path – again from the top right – but this time only the upper half is explored. The piece concludes with a large book tucked into the base, which is removed and carefully unfolded.

At the top are four small green boxes: Dad, The Boy, Girly, and Mum. My brother and I were never called by our names. Each box contains eight tiny objects – either once owned by or strongly associated with that person. The images below show the contents of Girly – my own box.

Along the left side are six large glass bottles – one for each of my children. Each bottle holds eight objects that tell part of their story. The four smaller bottles represent my grandchildren. Every bottle contains a marble, a school name tag, and a domino – the number of dots representing their order of birth: my firstborn has a double one, the second a double two, and so on, up to double six.

The contents are deeply personal: childhood treasures like Noddy badges, a Yoda figure for the Star Wars era, a fire engine for my son who became a fireman, an oil bottle from an apprenticeship in mechanics. Each bottle captures a tiny biography in objects.

Scattered throughout the work are small artefacts I have collected over a lifetime – leather baby bootees, cotton reels, boxes within boxes, six quail eggs bound with silver wire – a way of saying that although my six children have flown the nest, they remain bound to me by heartstrings.

On the opposite side of the box, behind a small window – perhaps a window to my soul – are 25 opaque scrolls, tightly bound with cotton thread. The lowest layer holds my deepest regrets. The centre, my blessings. The top, my hopes and aspirations. They cannot be removed without being destroyed – they are held fast, like so much of what remains unspoken in a life.

This piece is not linear. It does not explain itself. But it holds a thousand stories – layered, spiralled, woven into the objects that once passed through my hands and heart.