The Smell of Dreams

This morning I awoke from a distinctive dream, one of a series that have lifted me towards waking over the last week or so: Unlike the others – which have been labyrinthine, full of gothic imagery such as coffin-like objects lowering into the ground – this one was so simple that when I opened my eyes to the new day, my heart was aching, hollow as a bell.

In this dream, I had turned to my mother for her comfort, to tell her how much I was missing my dad, knowing that she could console me, only to realise that she  - like him - was now dead. I don’t remember clearly if I was seeking her in some house or other – though perhaps it was in our old family home, handsome red sandstone aglow in the late summer sun, she always in the kitchen, smoking pensively.  Certainly I felt a vivid sense of familiar doors and empty hallways, magnolia paint and the cry of gulls.

On the bedside table is my stack of half-read books, many drawn from the standard reading list of the recently bereaved: I spot them in many homes now, and am reminded of the ubiquity of this death thing, how ill-prepared my generation seem to have been for it. Why? Can we blame those very parents we grieve for now, for losing their own parents backstage, so tidily that their lives barely missed a beat? Tea was still on the table on time, school uniforms were washed as usual, and children didn’t attend funerals back then.

This black-bound library contains ‘H is For Hawk’, by Helen MacDonald, ‘Levels of Life’ by Julian Barnes, and Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’. From this last book I drew the title for a current exhibition, the culmination of an artist’s residency at Acorn Bank, a historic house and garden run by the National Trust.

I was given the use of a dovecot in their garden as a summertime studio, a peaceful place where visitors appeared from time to time as I worked. I had decided to make a quasi ‘portrait’ of the garden by distilling as many of its plant species as possible, using a technique I had used briefly before on another residency, where I learnt it from Hauser & Wirth’s then-gardener, the fabulously named Saskia Marjoram.

Over the months my shelves filled up with sealed jars of colourless liquid, ‘hydrosols’ as they are known, and on the table in front of my beautiful copper still I kept a row of open jars for the visitors to enjoy. Their tabletop nose-level appealed at first more to children than adults, but I soon grew tired of their pantomime horror as they rushed along the row, wrinkling their noses and shrieking at every new whiff. I probably looked like a witch to them, with my heaps of leaves, my steam, my messy hair. Yet Acorn Bank is the kind of property that attracts many more of the baby boomer and beyond generations than it does young families: Well-preserved, well-travelled couples in expensive outdoor clothing, on their way north to hike the Hebridean islands; retirees overseeing their indulged grandchildren, lamenting the overwork and mortgages borne by their children. These older people would open my studio door tentatively, the men stepping in first with a joke about whether I was making whiskey in here, or that “This is what you call ‘art’ these days is it?”.

But soon we’d be chatting easily and they’d bend down to the jars, inhaling deeply, often returning to one in particular, then standing upright again, their eyes skywards as they tried to ‘place’ the aroma.
Ooooh. Mother would rub something on my chest that smelled like that, when I had a cold.

I’ve not smelled a rose like that in decades. They all used to smell like that once.

But back to Joan, and to the dead.

In the time that I stood alone by the still, monitoring its temperature gauge, awaiting its slow trickle, I had much time to think, and the smells I was creating contributed to my reveries too. Heady, medicinal, herbal, and above all green.

Acorn Bank had spent decades as a nursing home – what we would now term a hospice – set within the lovingly tended National Trust garden. Chris – still the Head Gardener – had been here back then. In those days, NT visitors did not get to see the house, and it was probably not a huge loss given its wartime requisitioning and its quiet neglect since the owner – the mildly eccentric Dorothy Una Ratcliffe – had passed it on to the Trust and gone to live by the sea in Scotland.

Now, visitors walk freely around inside, but the rooms are devoid of original furnishings and seem to me to be somehow more expansive in their meaning, as a result. Without ancestral portraits, fine Chipperfield or copper pots on a well-polished range, I was easily able to imagine the nurses and carers that bustled about the place, the cooks ladling out soup, and of course, the countless visitors who must have stalled in the garden en route to see a loved one, inhaling its many scents before opening to door to the overheated fug of the home. I thought of all the residents, in the most part cooped up 24/7 with their windows tightly shut, the garden a two dimensional panorama wrapped around the ground floor rooms where they sat if they were well enough to be up. If they weren’t, from their beds upstairs a view of swallows belting about, black flecks against the sky.

I called the Sue Ryder Foundation for any information they might have from their tenancy. No paper records remained, I was told. The only evidence in the house was an old chest upstairs with a drawer labelled ‘Bodices’, and the odd institutional swing door where a fine, panelled one should have been.

Harvey, a curator at the Trust, had suggested Dorothy’s Drawing Room as a site for my exhibition, instead of the more rudimentary, bare rooms upstairs, or even an outbuilding. We agreed that its eau de nil walls – painted original Elizabethan panels – and its views onto the sunken garden were a potent backdrop to work against, although I had no idea what I would put in there. My distillations were colourless after all, their scent invisible and often fleeting, as -  unlike essential oils -  they are water-based, volatile, not meant to endure beyond a few months. In the past these hydrosols were folk medicines and cosmetics, occasionally flavourings (as orange flower and rose water are still in certain cuisines) but now the practice is largely industrialized, with a few artisanal producers still praising the hand-crafted approach and selling to niche markets.

As my distillations grew in number and range – from the tiniest herb to the beautiful if funereal purple beech that cast deep shadow outside the dovecot – I somehow knew that they needed to be present in the exhibition, but quietly so. The interactivity of the dovecot was well and good there, with me to talk to and the alluring still, the jugs and the jars to interpret the craft when I was absent. But the inclination of most visitors to guess what smell belonged to which plant was irrelevant to my growing sense that the exhibition was to be about those nursing home residents. It should be a memorial to their time here which could also capture the fleeting beauty and power of the garden then and now, the inexorable tension between mortality and nature’s renewal.

In the background, I continued to lightly research the life and concerns of the house’s former owner Dorothy, for her much revolved around a preoccupation with a supposed Romany bloodline in her ancestry. She collected Romany crafts and folklore, sometimes writing stories, plays and poems in dialect, and dallying with the equally Romany-obsessed painter Augustus John, one of whose ‘gypsy-ified’ portraits was in Dorothy’s collection. With Harvey I drove over to Leeds – past lay-bys of present day travellers and their ponies and carts, on their way home from Appleby Horse Fair – and we visited a patchy collection of her art and papers in storage. Dorothy came across as a watered down Bohemian a la Bloomsbury set, but with less talent, it has to be – regrettably - said. The survival of the original house, and the extensions of the gardens and orchard at Acorn Bank are rightly celebrated as her most significant achievements.

When Acorn Bank closed to the public in the evening, as artist-in-residence I was able to have free run of it. I’d an apartment at the top of the house, with creaky, squint panelled walls and a pastoral view across fields dotted with veteran trees. Downstairs, a pre-War atmosphere pervaded Dorothy’s Drawing Room, despite the Tudor authenticity of the panelling and the Georgian windows. The wall colour reminded me of vintage silk gowns and I easily imagined Dorothy’s drinks parties in here, cut glass sparkling, silver trays, a roaring fire with a few damp dogs flat out in front of it whilst she tipsily read aloud one her sentimental verses. I began experimenting with glasses – just charity shop stuff at first – in the empty Drawing Room, working on the floor under its one light bulb, the shutters closed to the night. I would balance them on top of each other, making a tower, or perhaps a fountain, thinking about Dorothy, about time and about the dead, before retiring upstairs, and beginning the distillations again the next morning.

At a National Trust meeting to plan my exhibition, all I said was that I’d be trying to make a fountain, that the hydrosols would be in it. Everyone smiled and nodded, eyebrows perhaps a little raised.

That odd green colour of the room’s walls also reminded me of something else that it took some time to discern: the ubiquitous institutional crockery service of that period, Woods Ware’s ‘Beryl’ range. Overnight - and in that frustratingly unmappable way certainties emerge in the creative brain at work behind the scenes -  I realised that to make the exhibition from glassware was wrong, it was too much about Dorothy’s life and habits and not about the time I cared about, after her. I should used something commonplace, utilitarian, un-precious – Beryl.

A month later, and I have asked a talented friend to be my technical assistant for the install. We are in the empty Drawing Room, removing the carefully wrapped newspaper from the last box of Beryl crockery, placing the pieces in a grid on the bare floorboards, each reunited with others of its kind, sourced via eBay from all corners of the UK and labelled so we can count our sum total before we begin : “Tureens”, “Big Cups”, “Salad Plates” (who would guess a wartime range would need so many different sizes of plate to eat from, despite rationing?) and the very rare – we have only 7 in over 700 pieces – “Wee Saucers”.  Ordinary tea cups and saucers form the bulk of our collection, naturally enough as I often still see them in use in out of the way church halls in Cumbria. When Harvey sees the stuff, we talk about how dainty in scale so much of it is, the dessert bowls no bigger than a single scoop of ice cream or a spoonful of trifle.
No wonder people were slimmer in those days. We laugh.

Strangely, I’m very moved to see this array of modest, everyday domestic ware – with no named designer to celebrate -  in such quantity and range. Beryl – the most ordinary of names, the name of a cleaner or a school dinner lady -  in this most common green hue was – incidentally – collected and prized by Andy Warhol,  a true connoisseur of the ordinary. Even now eBay in the US commands high prices for it. Our 787 pieces are all washed and carefully wrapped by hand from their 14 sources, despite costing on  average less than £2 a piece, pulled from garages in Cheshire, cupboards in Glasgow, lock-ups outside Nottingham, as well as a few pieces from my own collection, probably bought in Edinburgh in the early 1990’s. We wonder what other element of material culture we could have found so readily in such huge numbers in only 3 weeks  - it’s as if we have masterminded a clan gathering of the Beryl diaspora.

Fortunately I’ve devised a way of building with the crockery that isn’t sacrificial, though I haven’t planned what I’ll do with it after the exhibition. But it’s unthinkable to destroy it, however humble and replaceable it is. There’s to be a simple metal tray base into which a tower of Beryl will be constructed, using museum wax and builder’s foam. Concealed in its central spine a simple pump will circulate 100 litres of mixed hydrosols around the tower, trickling it into saucers and cups and bowls. and releasing a gentle, green aroma into the room. The room will be shuttered throughout the exhibition, lit by a single bulb. The images in my mind are of piles of awaiting washing up, the end of a party,  house clearances, the Mad Hatters Tea Party, and in the distant corners of my memory are some of the rooms I recall from a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where piles of the most banal of everyday belongings were rendered horrific by their mass.

We have just two days and one evening to build our fountain, using an approach based on the maquette I’d made at home, in a paddling pool in a shed. It had collapsed eventually, because I’d been reluctant to use the foam – a rather nasty stuff which requires a lot of careful cleaning up after each squirt. I’d tested the pump, but had no way to test its effect on what would be a 1.5metre high tower of  casually-stacked crockery. I also had no way to know if our 700+ pieces were enough – I had some bad nights sleep worrying about what we’d do if we got half way up the build and realised we’d run out, let alone what we’d do if it all crashed to the ground on those hard wooden floorboards. I got some rubber mats to place around our site, just in case.

Before we started – the evening ahead of the official install so keen were we to get going – I stared hard at our mute ranks of crockery and  then back at the space where the tower was to be, trying to map the two volumes onto each other. I usually had a good sense of volume – maybe because I’m a keen cook and gardener – but this was a new horizon and I could only be optimistic (in the end, we had only 48 ‘spare’ pieces).

The two days building go quickly, there are various National Trust procedures to be gone through, including a last-minute load bearing panic that ends up with the fountain base  - already with 30cm or so of crockery inside it - being manhandled on a protective plywood ‘plinth’. Luckily this happens when we are away eating lunch and not standing there fretting. When alone, we slowly circle the base, adding height and working inwards in a spiral, slowly diminishing the diameter of the pile, forming a roughly cone-like mass.  It is restful to work with my hands after so much time in front of screens. I’m pleased I can still do it.
It’s like dry stone walling with crockery, I say.
They never touch a stone without then placing it, the best wallers.
We laugh whenever one of use uses an especially distinctive piece such as a tureen or a coffee pot. Often we are silent, rolling the museum wax between our fingers to soften it, stepping back to look at the work before squatting down again and lightly checking our last decision with our fingertips. The radio plays out white noise and we don’t even notice it.

My assistant has lost her own mother very recently, nursed her throughout a savage illness. Perhaps we are both thinking of our dead mothers now as we work, those women who would have doled out countless cups of tea in these Beryl cups, women of coffee mornings and jumble sales and knowing when and how to be quiet, and when and how to ease pain with small talk.

This is a very feminine piece, I think to myself, and this is a Good Thing. My mum would have ‘got’ it. In the last few years I’m at last making things that I know would have touched her, connected with her, she who always laughed and reassured me that though all my work ‘went right over her head’, she was nevertheless so proud of me. When I remember periodically that she won’t be coming to see it, it is still a sad surprise, as I’ve talked to her so much about it in my head that it seems only natural that she will appear and we’ll have a coffee and a scone in the tea room later.

One of my nieces has come to work on the hydrosols while we build the fountain, and this helps me more than just practically. We stay in the top-floor apartment together, eat peculiar, thrown-together meals and laugh a lot at the DVDs I have brought. The invisible threads that bind a family’s women hold firm.

On the final day of the installation, I am only alone briefly when I pour the hundred hydrosols into the fountain base. A heady, thick scent fills the room. In moments, it is again full of people readying it for the exhibition preview that evening. Some are rushing about filling bin bags with debris, a trolley of glasses rattles past. Some are staring closely at the crockery fountain as it fills up and begins to glisten, the hydrosols trickling down and finding nooks and crannies to fill. It is mesmerising. Slowly we all exhale, reassured that it won’t collapse, crash onto the floor and return to just being old crockery. I’ve probably done a good job of appearing more confident on that front than I actually was.
I am euphoric. Quietly euphoric.

The exhibition, The Years of Magical Thinking, runs until Oct 29 2017 at Acorn Bank, Temple Sowerby, Nr Penrith, Cumbria.

With special thanks to Hannah Pierce & Harvey Wilkinson & the staff and volunteers of Acorn Bank. 

Photographs by Tom Lloyd