Bears

my sister, Imogen

L to R: Imogen, myself, and Jessica.

All photographs by Ann-Louise Buck

The teddies were a labour of love.

A few months ago, I decided to make some things using fabrics from clothing belonging to my dad. Cloth has been the medium of choice for this project. Cloth gives, and takes, cloth is a conduit, cloth protects us and receives us: our smells, our sweat, the memories of our bodies‟ movement.

I was looking to make a non-feminine or masculine cloth figure, and the teddy bear works because it is genderless, and also, in many western cultures, a traditional object of comfort. So I began with a pattern for a teddy bear, and extended the legs, made the tummy section into four pieces instead of two (which makes it wider), and used my doll pattern for the head. The bear-dolls are made from shirts and ties that once belonged to my dad Tim. The bears are jointed in a teddy-bear fashion, initially I used the traditional method of cotter-pin joints, however I found nut and bolt joints to be more secure.

Juliet Ash discusses the left over clothing of the deceased in a chapter of The Gendered Object entitled "Memory and Objects". She asserts that "[c]lothes presuppose the three dimensional human figure as well as defining its absence." (my emphasis, 1996, 219). Until we were left with Dad‟s clothes I had not encountered such a full-on example of clothing‟s emptiness. I find the bears comforting, whereas Dad‟s left-over clothing appears hollow/ in deficit, irrelevant to the point of unsettling; each item is an exclamation mark above his physical absence. By making the empty shirts and unworn ties into full, stuffed bears I can amend and re-configure his absence, into new objects that suggest a positive fullness.

Through the acts of making the bears, I was filling an empty space. The very act of stuffing is to renegotiate the empty space left in the garments by the absent body. To stuff is to make full. I have made a bear for my two sisters, my mum, and myself. By making the bears I am giving us something tangible to hold onto. I decided to photograph my sisters and I with the bears, and for these photos I made each of a us a dress, from the tea-stained quilters cotton that I use for the doll's bodies.

Lisa Lichtfields explains that in the German tradition of the "soul catcher", "if you lost a loved one and could not bear to be without them, you could make a „puppen‟ or perfect likeness, that might seduce the ghost to return and dwell again by your side" (2009, 14). Whilst I don‟t consider the bears any sort of literal "likeness", I imagine that as we get older, the bears can be integrated into our lives‟ material flotsam and jetsam, and provide an anchorage, perhaps one day being cuddled by our children. I concur with Peter Stallybrass when he contends that "…cloth is a kind of memory." (1993, 38) and in a really basic way, through using Dad‟s clothing I can keep his memory alive for myself and others.

As I see it, this procedure was a small-scale material investigation in comparison to the work of artist Christian Boltanski who uses second-hand clothes in installations to suggest mass absence. He explains:

For me there is a direct relationship between a piece of clothing, a photo and a dead body, in that someone once existed but is no longer here…What is beautiful about working with used clothes is that they have really come from somebody. Someone has actually chosen them, loved them, but the life in them is now dead. Exhibiting them in a show is like giving the clothes a new life- like resurrecting them. (1997, 19)

As can be understood from this quote, the same attraction towards use of worn clothing applies: it is clothing‟s association with the human body that makes it so potent. I could see signs of wear and tear whilst working with the shirts. There were slight sweat stains under arms and I found one of Dad‟s hairs on a shirt. These signs of humanness are intrinsically linked to the garments' materiality. In On Beauty, Umberto Eco describes "material" as having inherent "value and fecundity" (2004, 401). Eco continues, "Beauty, truth, invention and creation…have to do with the universe of things that can be touched and smelt… that are subject to wear and tear, transformation, decay and development" (2004, 402).I propose that the term materiality also relates to the garment‟s ambiguous, intangible essence gained by association with a human body, context or through the process of its creation.

The concept of "clothing memory" is examined by Peter Stallybrass in an article titled "Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things". Here, Stallybrass writes specifically about his experience of wearing the clothing of a close friend and colleague who had recently died. He explains, "If I wore the jacket, Allon wore me. He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows… the stains at the very bottom of the jacket…above all he was there in the smell" (1993, 36). Here Stallybrass exposes the reality of clothing.

It is clothing‟s association with the human body that makes it so interesting. When the shirts are made into a teddy bear form, and then jointed and stuffed, I feel them to be comforting. Therefore, in this case, the making process and the materiality are cathartic, Olsen describes dolls as "instruments that remove illness, ensure fertility and postpone death" (1998, 48).

All my objects are in some way instruments of healing. Through materials and form, the doll becomes an object of symbolic power, and capable of engendering a feeling of comfort in the beholder. The predominant process for all my work has been sewing- on a machine- but also via embroidery and needle-sculpture, by hand. Artist, Louise Bourgeois had a beautiful idea about sewing. Her family worked as tapestry restorers, and she grew up surrounded by women hand-sewing. She believed that "[t]he needle is used to repair damage. It‟s a claim to forgiveness" (1998, 222). Making this work has enabled me to begin to forgive, and to use my practice to understand my loss through materials.