It’s curious this looking business, looking at something you almost recognize as being what it says on the small white card next to the exhibit. Sand Marks. And these marks hang on linen-lengths two metres long by 40 cm wide. You don’t look at sand face-forward standing up with light pouring through the surface on which the marks are made. That feels unusual. The five linen-lengths are keeping each other company. A set of sand marks, marks in the sand. No. Marks from and of the sand. And why, She thought? What is this supposed to be about? Is this what art is? Grabbing images from under the feet. Their making engineered, conditions in place to shape and colour, fold and crease, to hold and position rightly. Hmm, She reflected, and thought of her daughter as a child, sitting on the sand of some annual Scottish beach. She would watch her soon to be two-year-old moving beach sand and stones around with her hands, seeing tiny dunes and valleys and routes appear, and making marks. Yes, that would be it. All that watching, that as she grew up became observing and collecting and storing away as images caught in a moment and placed in the mind’s diary, then often lingered over later (as only children can) defining her personal curation of things natural.
Here she is now, her mother thought, all these years on collecting and revealing such sand marks onto ordered frozen surfaces. Would these collectively be an installation she wondered? How She quietly distrusted that word. It was part of a vocabulary She felt She might do without. When She looked at these ecru linen cloths printed and manipulated variously She saw her daughter’s beautiful (always beautiful) hands entering sand, making marks in the fabric of the beach – as a child – now as an adult. There seemed no difference. Just this summer She had watched her daughter mesmerized at the sea’s edge, seeing the sand marks wander, bend and twist below shallow water, just as these hanging cloths seemed to do in her gaze. There was movement in stillness. Her daughter would wait with her camera to capture just the moment when light and ripple came together in a previously imagined moment: a perfect moment she longed to seize. Then later, up on the computer’s flat, backlit screen, it would be shown like a moth caught in a net and pinned behind glass.
In this light-filled gallery, a gallery filled with the reflected light of the sea just a minute’s walk away, this often sombre contemplative work became light of weight and texture, lost its sombre colours, those non-colour shades of grey and canvas, earth and mud, and seemed to float, bathed in light, the colours washed and fresh, alive. It was a revelation that it should be so, and She knew She would carry this view of her daughter’s linen pieces ever after – changing her view of what she’d seen as a steady stream of similar often sombre images representing ‘a body of work’ – another term She disliked and felt was not part of her world of seeing. She thought, ‘I garden, but I don’t do ‘work’ in the garden. What grows under my care and attention somehow has to be and flows through and past me. I don’t own my work in any way. It’s not for sale as something of me. It has no price tag. Work is cleaning the house or dealing with minutes of a meeting.’
There were in this light-filled gallery other pieces to look at. Her artists’ books in a glass cabinet were quietly covered in lichen green board, some closed, others opened to reveal more captured marks, stains and prints. Open to touch and view She warmed to a pair of her daughter’s sketchbooks, delighting in turning their pages carefully, so carefully as not to shake up the often delicate flowing marks on the paper. She imagined – as She herself had drawn once - her daughter’s intense concentration drawing these wider scenes – across the sea to the horizon where a turmoil of weather took place in the changing incessant cloudscapes.
There was other ‘work’ too, other artists’ efforts taking inspiration from landscape. Strange too, to call these pieces ‘work’. Such a term seemed to give their collective creative industry authority and stature She wasn’t always sure they necessarily had. Much of it seemed more play than work. It was so often playful.
Her daughter, meanwhile, was deep in conversation with the gallery’s exhibition officer. Whereas She dipped in and out of this conversation, her thoughts revolved, grass hopping. She remembered hearing her husband speak of his concern about their daughter’s management of this still-fledgling career. A right concern about how family and career would be handled as recognition and opportunity developed. She shared this concern, but seeing her daughter glow at being in the very swim of this art making and showing did not for a moment want that glow to disappear. She knew she would manage, she had always managed and been resourceful, careful, and, She had to admit this, brave. Her condition of being a single-parent She, as her mother, had almost grown accustomed to; She felt She knew a thing or two about finding happiness and the warmth of companionship.
Those linen-length pieces hanging there seemed to intersect such thoughts. She found herself looking at her daughter’s partner who was carefully sketching the linen quintet. He had said to her once that he sketched (badly) to enable him to focus intently on an object, to learn from it. If you sketched something you gave it time, and came to know it as line-by-line, shade-by-shade, the image formed and your relationship to it. He was always careful in talking to her, and even when he began to tread across ground that She hadn’t travelled, he was so sensitive to her feelings. He liked to explain, to tell out his enthusiasm for books he’d read, for music he loved, for her daughter he so adored. She could see that plainly, his adoration, his wonder at her. He had wrapped this young woman round and round with his adoration, and this clearly gave him such joy.
It was getting on. Lunch beckoned. There was a signalling that this hour or so of viewing would gradually fall away. The exhibition officer said her goodbyes. Food was mentioned. She would give one last glance at the Sand Marks perhaps. The linen-lengths still hung there luminous in the vivid, brilliant, but cold light of this early April day. After lunch they would walk to the sea under the powder blue skies and feel that this too was part of such a glad day, a day She would take to her memory as full of the restful pleasure her daughter so often gave her. This dear girl – how often had She heard her partner use that word ‘dear’, knowing he addressed his letters to her with ‘dearest’. It was wonderful that it could be so, that her daughter was so loved. She wanted, suddenly, to throw her arms around them both, and let them know, without any words, that she loved them too.