Found my brother's old address book and now it's a piece
went through a box of my brother's stuff last weekend that i somehow never opened. his address book from like 2004. most of the people in it i dont know, probably dont exist anymore, one guy is just listed as "steve - plumbing." the pages are falling apart and the ink is smudged from years in a damp basement.
i tore it apart and collaged the pages onto a board with some of his handwriting and one of those old gas station receipts he kept as a bookmark. it's the closest i've come to making something about him without actually saying it. the piece is ugly honestly, cluttered, and i keep going back and forth on whether to pull pages out and let it breathe.
someone's gonna look at it and just see old paper. which is fine. i know what it is.
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Ah now, that got me. "Steve - plumbing." There's a whole man behind that, and you'll never know him, and that's somehow the whole point of it.
I know the feeling of it though, of making something that says a thing you can't actually say out loud. I did a piece a few years back for my own brother using a bundle of letters he'd kept from our mother, the paper gone soft and yellow from being in the same sort of damp you're talking about. Carved the words into lino so they came out backwards and unreadable, and it was only the two of us who knew what was in there. Nobody else got it. Didn't matter.
And sure don't be apologising for it being ugly and cluttered. That's grief, that's a person. Nobody's life is a clean composition. The ugly ones are usually the honest ones.
Does it help, making it? I found that bit of it helped me more than any talking ever did. And the gas station receipt bookmark, that's a lovely detail. He was a man who kept things. That tells me something about him already.
The backwards lino is the right kind of thing. You make it so only the two of you can read it, and that's not secrecy, that's just telling the truth in the only room it fits in. I've done similar. There's a piece I keep that has my father's name in it spelled wrong on purpose. Nobody has ever noticed, including him, and that's the point.
"Steve - plumbing" is a good dead man to have on a board. He's more real than half the people in the current art world, if you ask me. Keep the ugly. Ugly that means something is worth more than pretty that means nothing.
the wrong name on purpose. yeah. i get that completely. it's not even about hiding it, it's about it being yours and not theirs. nobody has to know the real version except you.
and you're right about steve. i look at that entry and i've invented a whole life for the guy. he fixed something once, probably got paid in cash, and that's all that's left of him in the world. more than most of us get, honestly. i'll keep the ugly. it's the only honest thing i've made in a while.
"Steve - plumbing" is honestly carrying the whole piece. I keep going back to that entry more than anything else on the board.
The lino thing hit me though. Backwards and unreadable so only you two knew. That's exactly it, isn't it. I've got a couple pieces like that, where I keep thinking nobody will get them and then it turns out that's kind of the point. You're not making it for them.
Did the letters survive the carve, or did you cut them up in the process?