“Learning is a jigsaw, I wonder which piece I gave you”, my Mum used to say to her students. She always regretted not documenting the jigsaw pieces that she had collected throughout her life from others. In 2019, asked me to help by creating a biographical drawing. It was intended to evoke memories of her journey. I crammed small symbols of a seventy year life into an A4 page. Leaving no empty space, denoting this jigsaw metaphor. In this process my linework drawing style was triggered. Her mantra as a teacher now underpins the mission of my cross-curricular education business, The MoSAIC. In the same way that meaningless tiles can coalesce to form an image in a mosaic, different forms of knowledge can mean more when brought together in an interdisciplinary image. It’s one of the most pertinent things she has left me with.

Detail from:
Biography I
India ink on paper
2019

Ten years earlier, my mum’s twin sister’s dying words to her were: “I want you to know that you should not feel guilty, I want you to go and live on without me.” This was a promise my mother was unable to keep. For it is the twin who survives who is the one who truly dies. What followed was a decade of anxiety and guilt that caused rifts to form in our family. That caused missed opportunities. That turned happy occasions into stressful ones. That peddled homophobia fuelled by nothing but selfishness.

This was not the same person who raised me.

The terminal diagnosis gave us our old mum back. A surreal age regression back to a time when she’d never experienced disappointment. You could see the guilt that had stifled her for 10 years lift, knowing that she too was going to succumb to the same disease as her twin.

One core memory of my mother as a child was how much she valued humour. I could get away with anything as long as I was funny. I feel like this has validated my dark sense of humour I have come to embrace since watching her die. No one can get angry at you for saying horrible things about death when it is your way of grieving. Even if you do call a paper bag that was falling apart with the weight of her weekly shopping that you had just delivered to her a: “bag for life”. It is exactly this that got us through a difficult time. That, and art.

​​‘Golden Time’ is a much more pared back painting than my usual style. Yet there is still a naivety of an artist still trying to a find their feet. A testament to the circumstances of its creation. Art can act as essential catharsis for us, especially in times of need. ‘Golden Time’ was produced during and after my mother’s terminal illness. Ever the primary school teacher, she called the time spent together as a family in her last few months on Earth: golden time. This is the best time of a primary school child’s week. And it was the time that my mum too, had longed for. The time at the end of life’s week when you know for certain that you are going to die and so you make the most of every last second. 

This portrait of her with her grandson was inspired by medieval gilded images of the Madonna and child. The figures look out of frame leaving us to speculate what the maternal embrace is protecting the infant from. In the reference photo they are watching Baby Shark so this makes perfect sense.

I’ll never forget her final words to me. As her condition worsened, I started to rush the painting process of ‘Golden Time’ so that she could get at least a glimpse of what has become my final totem of her memory. The day before she died the sketch of the figures of her and my nephew were finished. I took it to her bedside. She was in a recently morphined haze, but took the canvas in her hands. Stared at it for a few seconds in contemplation. She then smiled with the look that only a proud mother could give. Then struggling to muster up the energy to speak she asked me her final question:

‘What the f**k is this?’