Original copy of the children’s book titled The Adventures of Miss Minette and Master Jocko: To which is Added The Marvelous Adventures of Dame Trot and Her Wonderful Cat. Published in 1850

The photographs in this article are from an installation by artist Fumio Tachibana. The photographer is Yasuhide Kuge. This exhibition was the first time I had consciously experienced the artist, his inspiration, materials, work, and working space as inseparable. Tachibana is someone who has mastered the art of evocation. The re-purposing and re-imagining of “fragments” woven or arranged into a new whole is a important concept in my own work.

His subject is Clara, a fashion institute for western style dressmaking in Japan, founded and run by Motoko and Shiro Koike in 1923. They also published a fashion magazine called Yosai Shunju. The building was demolished and the magazine banned during World War 2 in 1944. I’ll take a wild guess that anything to do with western culture was not at all popular in Japan during that time. Motoko revived the institute as a classroom studio in the 1950s. When the studio was dismantled, Fumio Tachibana collected and reorganized the fragments of Motoko’s work and materials (drawings, sketches, dressmaking patterns, postwar Japanese handbills, wrapping paper, silk thread, and printing equipment) into a large scale installation of new artworks and arrangements in their own space so that the classroom itself was part of the work. There is something powerful going on here in that Motoko’s presence is strongly felt in the photographs.

Source: Communion W, 2001 Curator: Can Wong

“Who needs a telephone? This (he took a pinch of tobacco from a pouch) is my communication. Better than any telephone. Telephone carries your voice around the earth, not up to the Creator. You don’t need a telephone to talk to the Creator. When we want to talk to the Creator we burn tobacco and it takes our prayers all the way up to the Sky World. What telephone can do that?” ~ Louis Farmer, Onondaga Nation

Occasionally, there were happy endings where the child was reclaimed, apprenticed, or adopted. However, more often than not, the foundling children immortalized in these unusual ledgers died young and were buried in unmarked graves. What almost all of them have in common is that this is all that is left of their existence, which is perhaps more of a mark than most people leave, even those who have happier beginnings or more successful lives. There are just bits of cloth, a ribbon or a button attached to the faded pages in a record book, something so practical and seemingly ordinary which have across time and upon rediscovery become completely fascinating. So beautiful and sad. Haunting.

Foundling 14695. An embroidered sampler left with a boy named William Porter, admitted on the 6th of December in 1759 and died on the 27th of May in 1760.

Captain Thomas Coram opened the Foundling Hospital in 1741 with a charter awarded to him by King George II. Artists William Hogworth, Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Gainsborough along with composer George Frideric Handel were patrons of the endeavor, donating the proceeds from their works. The idea was revolutionary and progressive in its time. Desperate and destitute young mothers, who did not have the means to care for their children whether they were unmarried or widowed, were given the opportunity to house their children in a safe place with no questions asked and gifted with open invitation to reclaim their children when and if possible.

Many of these mothers were probably children themselves, in the worst of circumstances, who would otherwise have abandoned their infants on doorsteps or in the street, or watched them die of illness or starvation.  Now given some bit of hope, represented by a scrap of cloth from a child’s garment or their own, young mothers left the hospital with a textile ticket and its exact match from the same piece of clothing was attached to a ledger recording the infant’s details and description, proof that this child was hers. There is some kind of magic there.

Foundling 16516. Patchwork made from printed and woven fabrics, embroidered with a heart and cut in half. One half was left with a boy who was admitted in 1767. He was named Benjamin Twirl by the Foundling Hospital. His mother Sara Bender reclaimed him on June 10th in 1775.

Foundling 14922. A bit of threadbare linen ‘flowered all over with playing cards’ left with a boy in 1759. He was named Joseph Floyd by the Foundling Hospital. He was apprenticed in 1769.

Foundling 14953. A boy was admitted on October 3rd of 1759 wearing ‘checkt stuff’ and was named Mentor Lesange by the Foundling Hospital. In 1770, he was apprenticed to a farmer named Hercules Durham.

Foundling 13187. A girl of 14 days wearing ‘yellow satten flowered’ was admitted June 20th in 1759 and given the name Lucy Locket. She a died a few weeks later on July 2nd.

Foundling 10563. A girl was admitted on the 22nd of November in 1758 with heart cut from red woolen cloth pinned to her cap, probably cut from her mother’s dress or coat. She was named Isabel Crane and died a few weeks later on December 16th.

Foundling 2275. A boy admitted in September 1756  attached to a flowered silver ribbon with a paper note sewn into it and died the same month.

Apparently someone on the hospital staff folded the paper sheets into small packages of nine folds, most of which were never opened, and eventually collected into books. For this reason, they were accidentally preserved and rediscovered two and a half centuries later.

Sources:

Francis Spaulding, “Swatch with Mother”, The World of Interiors, March 2011, p 102 – 108

Shelly Goldsmith, “Scrap of a Thing”, Selvedge, Issue 36, p 37 – 40

http://www.johnstyles.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/materiallondon.htm

http://www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk/exhibit_handel.php

The handwritten pages of a notebook on geography and surveying, kept by Joshua Tevis in 1804.

Peaches, cherries, pears, blueberries, and fig.

Refugees from the old beach road. They are all planted now.

]]> https://wildmuse.net/hobbity-homestead/feed/ 15 https://wildmuse.net/the-new-abode/ https://wildmuse.net/the-new-abode/#comments Sat, 27 Nov 2010 01:06:00 +0000 http://wildmuse.net/new-abode/ Continue reading →]]> I have moved from the garden by the sea to a garden in the woods not far from the sea. It’s another hobbit-like house built into a hill with a half acre of cleared land for gardens and a forest of brambles. There are wild berries and herbs hiding in there somewhere and I’ll find them eventually. C.P. and I have made a small dent in setting up new gardens just in time to put them to bed. Freya loves it here. I’ve never seen her so relaxed. Little Nemo is still pouting. I think he misses his ocean view. I don’t. When I look out of any window, all I see are trees. It’s so peaceful and much warmer. The ocean is a 20 minute walk instead of a 20 second walk. This beach has more rocks which also means that there are fewer people. Not bad at all.

The old shed has electricity and running water so with a little patience and labor I’ll have a new studio by next summer.

There are water pipes everywhere and a well.

The view from the front and Freya’s favorite new spot.

My flying carpet. Mine!

 Although I would never again wish to live in a city, I have a fascination with small urban gardens and allotments. There is such an abundance of charm in small gardens with their clever use of structures and strategic plantings. The victory gardens on the Fenway create an oasis in the midst of crowds, cars, and chaos.

There are rusty nails and thorny branches all over the posts and gates. I know they are there to discourage vandals and thieves yet no less beautiful and sculptural in this context.

C.P. McDill and I made a rare visit to the city for gallery hopping and window shopping. We strolled from the Commons through the Public Garden and down the full length of Newbury Street, stopping to admire the hand carved cabinets of Jenna Goldberg and the incomparable paintings of Goxwa at Axelle. We wandered through the exhaustive maze of allotments at Fenway Victory Gardens working up an appetite for the amazing Thai cuisine we had for dinner. We ended the evening by winding up the main street, returning to the Commons in time for sunset on the pond and a carousel ride. It was a perfectly lovely day capped off by reading many generous blessings and good wishes for which I am thankful.

Photographs, of course, do not do Goxwa’s work justice. There is so much light in these paintings. I recommend that anyone near Boston visit her solo show at Axelle Gallery on Newbury Street. These are just details taken with a digital. The full compositions have more impact.

Scrap wood bird house with a nail for a perch.

These are much more expensive birdhouses in a shop display on the main street. ! I like these but I prefer the scrappy DIY version.

Sunset and a white rabbit ride.

Lost in the limbo land between buying and selling a home. It seems as if all we’ve done this spring and summer is work on one or the other house or garden and move objects between them. Cats are confused. I am exhausted. The blog has been neglected. I’ve been painting walls and longing to paint again from a palette rather than a can. I am excited to move into my new home though and I love it madly even though it’s stolen all of my time. The most challenging and emotional part of all this has been moving the gardens, deciding which plants to keep and which to leave and where they go and all that jazz. These photos were taken last week at the beach house garden. Everything has changed dramatically again. Faded irises have given way to an explosion of daisies, coreopsis, and foxglove. So much inspiration. So little time.

Embroidered satin book with floral motif. The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London, 1639)

Embroidered velvet book with scroll and floral pattern. Orationis Dominic: explicatio (Geneva, 1583)

17th century embroidered satin book with pictorial angel and trees. The Whole Booke of Davids Psalmes (London, 1634)

Embroidered Canvas book, pictorial angel and floral motif with two red ribbons. The Booke of Common Prayer (London, 1611)

17th century embroidered velvet book cover. A Comfortable Treatise, for the reliefe of such as are afflicted in Conscience: revised the third time, … interlaced, and enlarged in many places. (London, 1620)

Front and back covers of an embroidered satin book with two sets of metal clasps. The Whole Booke of Davids Psalmes (Edinburgh, 1644)

Embroidered satin book cover with silver threads. Good Newes from Heaven. (London, 1631)

Embroidered book cover with sequins. The Holy Bible (London, 1642)

Satin embroidered book cover with threads of coloured silk ‘woven’ across upper and lower covers. The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London, 1627)

The mysterious thing about these old book pages is that they have “1724” marked in pencil on them, which is something a dealer would have done and yet they are stuffed at the bottom of a sewing kit and cut to the edges in a way that indicates the are being used as padding. Interesting naive woodcut illustrations. I like some of the little details, especially the skull and bones with mushrooms.