Miranda Whall

What a difficult time this is…as I inch towards my exhibition I am preoccupied by a seemingly endless list of things to do, decisions to make..at last the book has gone off to the printers, thank you sincerely to Stefhan Caddick the designer, and the photos and drawings are getting printed in Cardiff as I write, just the film to finish now, but while I move forward… each day my father is getting thinner, weaker and less lucid all the way over there in North Norfolk, I feel like I am holding my breath, submerged under water, muffled, mute, catatonic, in a state of limbo while also inwardly screaming with stress…and there is some excitement for the exhibition too of course, what a strange and deeply conflicting combination of emotions.

Two weeks ago I set myself the task of drawing each of the 8 plants that Mariecia from Pwllperian had identified, plants that I would have crawled past, over or through along my route. I had wanted to include drawing in the project from the outset, I had initially intended to draw from life, up there in the field, but that moment had passed and I was faced with a week to complete the series of 8 drawings before my book had to go to the printers.

My father has suffered with cancer since 2010, having had numerous operations he is now managing the terminal illness from his bed at home in North Norfolk, with a diagnosis of a few weeks to live, we, his family and close friends have been making many visits to be with him and to care for him in these last extremely precious days and weeks.

I quickly realised that there was no possibility of my being able to complete 8 drawings while caring for my dad in the week running up to the deadline, so I quickly realised that I had to adapt in the face of the impending deadline and the adversity of the situation, so I asked my dad if he would contribute to the project by doing a drawing for me, to my amazement he was immediately engaged with the proposition and ready to go! he drew for about 15 minutes from his bed, shaky, weak but as focussed as always, the drawing is so strange really, so sad, so poignant, so unspeakably precious to me. Coincidently I gave him the White clover to draw, I hadn’t realised at the time that was the last of the plants in the sequence of 8. He followed the drawing for my project with some more drawing – the completion of his own last drawing Akin, in this work he is somehow aligning himself to the amputated tree that he looks at from his pillow through the window to his bedroom. He is preoccupied by where and how his soul is ‘housed’, he has it located in his brain and below his rib cage, and he depicts his body somehow hanging within the branches of the tree, to complete the drawing he had to make some measurements, so I helped measure blemishes on his body. The drawing is as always a fascinating, deeply complex and multi layered, decipherable only by those that have carefully followed his work, who understand his written notations, sadly, shockingly they have become illegible now to him, he is no longer able to de- code his own notes even with a magnifying glass!. Over the subsequent days that I was with him it became apparent that he would not have been able to do the drawing for me at any other time, amazingly I seemed to have caught the moment, the small window where this drawing had been possible.

I went on to ask each of my family and our dear family friend Lucy to contribute a drawing, in homage to my dad, by way of contributing to a collective, a family project, the last family project – I think there was one other family project- Dad’s strange hermaphrodite figure which was made up of all our body parts, it loomed tall over later manifestations of his installation L’Appareil Pedagogique avec ses Apanages 1966 – 69.

Thank you Dad, Dick Whall, Helena, Andrew, Jill, Lucy, Ioan and Robyn for your precious time and engagement with this project