Artist's pages

Abstract

These artist's pages, focusing on the remnants of somebody's life, comprise a cluster of paratext pieces (text with image) that reflect on the ruin as indexical trace. Each piece relates to an item from the cellar office and workshop of my late father, an archaeologist whose final years were spent, immobilised by Parkinson's disease, lying in a room directly above the detritus that became an archive of his life. Each paratext piece is a retracing, and at the same time a new reading. Apprehended by being traced also through drawing and by photographic means, the ruin is re-positioned between an originating present and the moment of marking. The ruin here is performed not represented, in an act of retrieval.

Notes

1 Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/substratum, accessed October 2014

2 ‘This is that has been’ is my own phrase, an interpretation of Mulvey's discussion of ‘the photograph's relation to time but also to [the deictic] tense’, derived from Barthes' summation of ‘photography's essence’ as ‘the That-has been’ (1982: 77).

3 As painting students at Camberwell we were taught to ‘look by drawing’, that is, to use drawing as a tool for rigorous observation, and vice versa.

4 Citation from my grandfather's diary for 16 September 1918 ‘the pilot yelled back at him to “go for the push”, he seized “a broom handle that was to hand” and dislodged the final bomb’ – phrases used by my grandfather to describe those events of 1918, the first being in his Collins diary and the second in the account he gave my father seventy years later, in 1987, which my father typed up, twice

5 The Hatchett documents inherited by my father are now in the Royal Society archives, London