Having been in lockdown I was forced to look closer to home for inspiration and ideas. I became more frugal, everything became a potential art project. When I first started keeping the broken eggshells I did not know what I wanted to do with them, it was a bit of a ritual, it was amazing to realise how many eggs we were eating – from breakfast, to cakes to yorkshire puddings. We got the eggs locally, supporting a local cafe who could not open and had taken to selling produce instead. The egg shells gained in significance, the pile getting larger and larger every day – symbolic of the length of time we had spent in lockdown. The repetitive nature of each day reinforced by the repetition of cracking and washing the eggs, evident in the growing pile of eggshells.
The egg shells were extremely fragile and delicate porcelain like. I wanted to strengthen them, to transform them, but resources were limited – I didn’t have porcelain slip, or plaster of paris, or the facilities and room to use them. I did have mod roc and so started the process of covering each shell in strips of modroc. The physical, hand made process of covering each egg shell in layers of mod roc was extremely satisfying – unlike ‘dipping’ the shells, the surfaces were textured, embedded with the hand of the maker. Each shell takes approximately 4 minutes to cover – it is a long, repetitive process and without a plan in mind, it often felt pointless, and yet I continued, almost driven to create structure in my day whilst also creating a monotonous structure which was at times extremely boring, but it was something and I had time on my hands and nothing to lose.
The more I worked on the eggshells, my mind turned to the menopause. As women we are born with millions of eggs, in our lifetime we are lucky if some of these are fertilised, the rest are simply wasted, every month we go through the bloody process of losing more until we reach menopause when we have none left. As I head towards menopause I am extremely conscious of the cycle of life and each eggshell I cover becomes symbolic of another egg lost. The repetition of the process mirrors the repetition of the fertility cycle, it becomes quite compulsive, laborious, never ending! I need the work to be huge in scale, it needs to have an enormity about it, it needs to come crashing to the ground from a great height.
In my experience the menopause is not something that is discussed. During puberty our mothers explain the menstruation cycle to us, at this point they have not usually reached menopause themselves so have no experience of it and at the beginning of a young girl’s fertility cycle, she is not thinking about how it all might end! By the time the mother goes through the menopause, the daughter has left home, is independent, the last thing she wants to do is discuss her mother’s hot flushes and so the next generation stumble across it. Maybe things are changing. I am a child of the 70’s, most things were pushed under the carpet. My friends are in the same boat as me as we admit to each other we have no idea when or how the menopause might happen and what our options are, we just blindly wait and see.
As a mature student, the naked body does not surprise me, sex does not shock me, I am not particularly angry with the world and have found it difficult to find a ‘cause’ for my art. In this work I feel a quiet self reflection, and am excited to be able to express it through the repetitive, immersive nature of creating the work and of the work itself.
Questions:
Do I make the number of eggs I use significant?
How do I build the structure – from invisible wire or stitched onto a form (fabric or mesh). I can pierce holes though the covered eggshells.
How do I transport and install the structure?
Is it a stand alone piece – how can I extend the project?