Critique MFALR 2022 Emily Carr University of Art & Design

Final Critique Nov 28/2022
Megan Carroll

Toilet Brush WIP

Doris Ruby Vissers
1928-2021

One of my earliest memories was my grandmother visiting. I was about 4- she lived in Australia but was working in Canada as a nurse in a remote northern Inuit village. She was visiting or helping us??  I think my dad was away- he was a heavy duty truck driver. He was in Saudi Arabia- trying to make money to get the family ahead. I idolised my grandmother, she was exotic, had great clothes and said things like, “Never put new shoes on a table.” or “Never leave the house without lipstick on”. One day Gramma wanted to teach me how to make pancakes. We mixed all the things by her account- we did not follow a recipe, and as they cooked two things happened: They burned and they did not rise, that is when I first learned about self-rising flour and possibly something else was strange. Gramma also taught me how to make Rum and Cokes on that visit. 

Gramma's house was the first house that I had ever been in that had a walk in pantry... I was fascinated by it and would spend extra time there going through its contents. I can still feel the boxes of muesli damp from the salty tropic air and smell the moth balls to keep away the relentless insect life. I remember that she loved curry and would put sultanas in everything. I never knew you could add nuts and fruit to salad! Oh and the boozy fruit cake (she sent us one every christmas)!

My grandmother’s house was a small funky A-frame, a glorified beach cabin, on the east coast of rural Northern Australia. It had two compact floors. Upstairs was my domain, it had a balcony where I would watch the moon and listen to the crashing waves each night. The kitchen was tiny but had a walk-in pantry. The most modern room in the house was the bathroom, it had a tiled floor that ran up the side of a large tub. One of the walls, finished in a dark teak, sloped low over the tub. She had a regular toilet and a bidet (I was too intimidated by it and never used it- though I would turn it on to watch the second flow of water!). She had a double sink with a large mirror. I would go through the drawers, try on her make-up and look at her jewellery. Try as she might, it had a musty dank smell, everything was almost always damp as nothing really ever dried out in the humidity. 

One morning I went downstairs to use the toilet, almost stepping into a large, thick pool of gelatinous blood. In alarm, I went into my Gramma’s room, she wasn’t quite in bed. I found her with her legs propped up the side of her bed, the small black and white TV knocked off the low footstool and her head resting on it as if it was a pillow. There was blood in her hair.

Sometime in the early morning she had fallen in the bathroom and hit her head on the sharp tiled corner of the bathtub. She somehow made it back to her room, but not quite to bed. 

I was so scared, with the amount of blood, how she was laying, I thought the worse. In a panic, I called my friend, whose father was the head of the local emergency dispatch. 

From somewhere, my grandmother’s boyfriend appeared. I'll never forget what he said “It’s your problem.” and then disappeared, leaving me to clean up the congealing blood. While I waited for the ambulance.

When she came home she was furious. I had sent her to the hospital where she worked as the head sister (nurse). My friend’s dad had driven her in his ambulance. The nights of us sitting around watching the telly and talking about my dad, whom she revered, her knitting and sipping wine, me drawing, came to an end. Shortly after, I called my dad, and he arranged my ticket so I could fly home just shy of my six month stay. My friend and her father drove me to the airport two hours away and I left Northern Queensland on a Qantas 747. When the flight attendant brought me my meal, I asked for a Rum and Coke. 

I have an image of Grandma in the desert. Wind blowing and looking glamorous. That is my vision of her always.

I ate a passionfruit this morning. The smell was so intoxicating that it took me to her home again. When I stayed with her I used to collect the ones that fell from the vine. I could hear them fall onto the tin roof and roll down the A-frame.  I would slice them in half, take a small spoon, go sit on the beach beneath her coconut tree and watch the waves as I ate it. 

Themes I have been working on this semester and the last two years:

  • Women’s Work- through my use of textiles and domestic objects.

  • Domestic Labour- upon reflection is a circumstantial resentment.

  • Grief, past, present and future.

  • Memory- I spend a lot of time thinking about textiles and their ability to remember, how they hold traces of the body, wear and tear from carpet, to bedsheets to clothing. How they are used to reveal and conceal. 

  • Generational learning through textiles, connection between textiles and women’s experiences.

The Kitchen Floor Series: (experimental)
Charcoal, Chinese Ink (Black and Gold)
Broom and Feet on Paper

I started working on these as I was thinking about how to represent domestic labour. I wanted to use the items that I use everyday and show traces of the body and the action. The first ones were done with a broom, on my kitchen floor using what space was available. I walked around them and through them using a sweeping gesture. They are approximately 4’x4’.

The next grouping also done on my kitchen floor is Considering the Bathroom. Again laid out on my kitchen floor, I used a variety of tools that I use to clean my bathroom. A cleaning rag, toilet brush, hand broom  and squeegee. I mimicked the motions of washing the floor by hand, sweeping up remnants, cleaning and removing streaks from glass.  They are approximately  20”x20” 

Left to Right:
Chinese Ink, Black and Cleaning rag
Chinese Ink, Black/Gold, Hand Broom
Charcoal, Gouache, Chinese Ink, Black/Gold and Toilet Brush
Chinese Ink, Black/Gold with Cleaning rag and Squeegee
On Paper

Interruption progress. A few observations I have made about this piece. I started off with a very clear intention and slowly it is changing. I am not sticking to my strict time limit but now doing it as time allows. I have had to make this modification because I was starting to feel overwhelmed by it and slightly resentful. It began as a way to record labour but now just like my daily chores I am resentful of it taking and consuming time.

Interruptions Nov 23 (progress)
Linen Bedsheet, Embroidery Floss

Check back for image of the Apron… Could not get a good photo of it today. Will try again tomorrow.

Current readings and influential artists:

His genetic story was already written.

A couple of years ago, when I was generating ideas for stories for an assignment (shout out to cohort 22),  I would go to my local antique store for inspiration. I was instantly  drawn to a Pyrex Baster and bought it.  A story very loosely forming in head but not fully realized.  I have been carrying it around with me for the last two years, until I unpacked and knew immediately how I was going to use it.

Six months after my husband and I married in an abrupt ceremony in 1998. We were back in the US from Germany, where my husband's family was. He was in the US Army, and we were 'home' for Christmas. One evening, his father sat us down in the kitchen and explained to us that my husband's mother had Huntington's Disease.  The reason for telling us this, then, they thought I could be pregnant - why else would we have done something so foolish?

I will probably never get over the fear in my husbands eyes that night as he left the room, leaving me standing there confused, lost and scared.  I had never heard of Huntington's Disease. I did not know it was an incurable brain disease, it was fatal and that people who have the mutation have a significantly reduced life span with their quality of life rapidly declining often starting in the prime of their lives.  Any child born to someone with the HD mutation, as my husband was, has a 50/50 chance of inheriting it, and so would any children they had (if they had the gene).

Several years later we would be sitting in a waiting room watching the clock tick  as we waited for the result of his genetic fate. Distractedly I looked at magazines and the images on the wall, all I could see were babies and happy smiling families. When we were called into the office, we sat down directly from a large window, staring out onto a sunny beautiful day full of light.  Looking at both of us, the Dr opened the envelope and asked my husband "Do you really want to know?". My world went black. My husband vowed that we were never having children, he had the gene that causes Huntington's Disease.

(if you want to find out about our journey you can see it here- Do You Really Want to Know?)

*It has a happy-ish ending-I make this sound really dire, and it was, part of me crumpled that day and I put the thought of children in box, locked away- I started crying, and my husband asked for a job! Literally asked for a job in a lab researching HD. We then went out that night to an extraordinary meal and got very drunk. When the waiter asked us what were were celebrating and we told him. We were comped very expensive champagne.

**In 2005 there would be an opportunity to do a process called IVF/PGD where they could test each fertilized eggs at an 8 cell stage for the mutation. We were the first couple in Canada to do it for a genetic disease! There were two gene negative embryos and they implanted both. Yay for science! My husband who is only now beginning to show telltale symptoms,  still researches HD, something that he is committed to until he gets too sick to work.