Snippets from 1922 letters

Brief notes from 1922 letters

I have spent some of my summer re reading the letters..plenty of little stories happening. One which really shows Mary Greg’s caring attitude is illustrated by this quote from a letter to Mr Batho from Mary , June 30th 1922.

“I also want to ask you for the name of the good attendant at the umbrella place – the one who had been so ill – slightly deaf – I want to send her a little thing to keep her warm.”

Mr Batho informs her that the lady at the Umbrella stand is called Miss Ellen Lucas. I wonder what Mary Greg sent her? I also think we should bring back staffed umbrella stands.

Hazel

The mystery of the missing letters

ABC counters

Our resident photographer, Alan Seabright, has just spent the morning taking lovely photographs of the ABC counters (1922.534) currently on display (or at least they will be once I have put them back) in the Gallery of Craft & Design.  These are going to be used by Jonathan Hitchen, who is the Programme Leader for Graphic Design at MMU in some sort of  Mary Greg typeface creation that we’re getting very excited about.  The process of taking photos revealed something mysterious upon which I would like to muse for a while…

Which letters are missing from the series?  6 of them, no less.

A, D, E, N, S, Y

As a crossword fiend, I noticed that this is an anagram for “And yes!” or, “Yes, and?” which made me chuckle.  I then typed the letters into a special anagram site online and came up with the following  – totally senseless – but there’s something a bit ‘Da Vinci’ code and eccentric about it all which makes me think of Mary.  What can it mean?

Ad Yens
And Yes
Sand Ye
Sad Yen
Ads Yen
Days En
Day Ens
An Dyes
Nays Ed
Any Eds
Nay Eds
As Deny
Say End
Say Den
Ay Send
Ay Ends
Ay Dens
Ya Send
Ya Ends
Ya Dens

The letters also nearly spell ‘Denys’ – who was both my supervisor at university and a few centuries before that, a mystical theologian who wrote all sorts of things which perhaps are or perhaps are not relevant to Mary.  But that’s another story…

Alex

Man’s best friend

Hello! I’m new to Mary-land and was just browsing the letters when I came across something a little bit horrible.

“I am sending the engraving of D Law from the Church as you kindly suggested, also one or two odds & ends from the museum & the two dogs which were Mr & Mrs Gregs’ pets”.

(To Mr Batho, from Mr Hummerstone, 13/07/1925)

The Gallery was sent a pair of bygone dogs?? Where are they now? Batho doesn’t mention them in his reply to Hummerstone. The thought that these dogs might still be lurking in some dark storage room creeps me out a bit. Good luck to the person that finds them!

Mari

Fascinating Hobbies

Fascinating Hobbies, Razor Blade Packets

Fascinating Hobbies

This collecting lark is hard to shake off once you have the bug. We tried to clear out the coal hole and get rid of some of our collection the other day…it wasn’t easy and we just packed it all back in neatly. Then Michael bought a huge carrier bag of these old cigarrette cards from the boot sale on Sunday and this card was amongst them.

“Collectors try to get as many different makes as possible and as many different variations of prices per blade printed in the design.”

I don’t think I come into that catergory, I never get obscessed with getting all the set of anything, but I can see why people do. I do have a large selection of different razor blade packets though, as the designs are beautiful.

Hazel

Kunstkammer

Maybe there’s something in the air, maybe it’s just serendipity. This morning, enjoying the freedom of the first day of a holiday break, I finally found time to follow a link to the blog 0101. Written by Principal Manager of Collection Management at Manchester Art Gallery, Vincent Kelly, the blog documents aspects of his practice as an artist. Vince’s most recent post, A Cabinet Of Curiosities, includes a beautifully photographed assortment of objects that he has collected over his lifetime.

We spend time with people and get to know them through their actions and behaviours, their dress, their voice, the stories they tell, and we carry this loosely forged sense of them with us as an incomplete but passable cipher for their identity. And then, often without warning, we catch sight of a new, previously unknown to us, aspect of their character that enriches our loosely sketched portraits. So it is with Vince’s collection. What connection is there between the 1950s Swedish carpet needle and the 1960s Sindy & Paul go to the Discotheque knitting pattern? I wonder did Vince go to the Electric Chair to hear Maurice Fulton in 1997, and if he did, what memories does he have of it now? I wonder too if the 1953/54 Northumbria District Junior League Winners Medal belonged to a relative or did Vince find it whilst puddling about in his garden as a child.

This collection of wonderful but disparate objects, like Mary’s, forms a gateway into story making, the stories we make in response to them and the stories the collector, openly, or in ignorance, weaves about themselves. Who of us, as Chris notes in his wonderful post The Wicker Basket, knows why we collect what we collect. But one thing is clear, it is the very materiality of stuff, stuff which accrues the marks and dirt of time, the grease and snuff of human touch, that connects us with our existence and the existence of others in a palpable and grounded way. Will we be able to feel the same way about our mp3s and digital videos and photographs when, in some distant future we revisit what we have collected around us, as we do about the Super Eight cine film or the Pinky and Perky 7″ Record? We’ll surely find value in the technological carriers of the information, the PCs, the iPhones, the external hard drives and digital cameras, but what of the immaterial zeros and ones, the bits, the bytes, what will feel about them, what stories will they weave?

Horn-Books (A Student Response) – Nousheen Leila Saboonpaz

At the Mary Greg handling session I was completely overwhelmed by the vast amount of objects the collection held, I didn’t know where to start with picking out something to set my project on, I could have happily spent the whole day just opening up the cabinets. But a few objects had really intrigued me, these where the Horn books, which I found out where used as learning aids for children. One of the books had a sticker on the back, onto which someone had written “Probably never been used”, who’d written it..I don’t know…Mary Greg herself? Its a possibility. I took as many photographs as I could and headed to the All Saints Library, where I found a book called “History of the Horn-Book”, which to my surprise had never been taken out from the library. In the book I found images of the horn-books I had seen in the collection (pages 117 and 357), along with some beautiful drawings of Horn-Books being used, worn and enjoyed. 

 From what I had discovered in my research I have created jewellery which can be worn and interacted with, just as the Horn-Books where. I wanted my pieces to be large and a burden to wear. The books hold personal chores, sort of a to do list of things I am always putting to the back of my mind, and daft things that I can never remember, the 7 times table for example, and little rhymes from school, I have made my own Horn-Book effectively, something I enjoy wearing and will always remind me of what I have taken from the Mary Greg collection.

  Nousheen Leila Saboonpaz

One of the horn-books in the Mary Greg Collection

books almost identical to those in Mary’s collection in “History of the Horn-book” from the MMU library

One of my responses in metal and paper

a wearable one with pages open

The Mary Effect

I had a meeting with our fundraising manager a couple of days ago to discuss possible sources of funding to take the Mary Greg project to the next stage. And it happened again. What seems to happen whenever anyone is introduced to this collection for the first time – a passionate, personal, immediate response, an intensely animated conversation and a sense that you’ve just go to know someone a whole lot better than you did an hour ago. So, inspired by the shoes at Platt Hall and Alex’s earlier post about our visit there, this is from Chris Whitfield.

The Wicker Basket

Shoes in the collection at Platt Hall

Preparing for a recent meeting with Liz regarding fundraising for new developments around the Mary Greg project, I came across the box of shoes at Platt Hall on the website. That image and Alex’s thoughts about the shoes being ‘once full of life’ reminded me of an old wicker basket under the stairs at home, the contents consisting of 7 years of my two young daughters’ shoes as they rapidly outgrow each pair. Overcome with a melancholic desire to take another look at this broken and busted pile, with their etched in scrapes and worn down soles, loaded with memories, stories, tears, laughter and the passing of time, I recall what contains them, an old wicker basket. Not any old wicker basket but one I remember since early childhood, one that has followed me from towns to cities, roads to streets, flats to houses.

Chris's shoe basket

That evening whilst investigating the basket contents and taking photographs for the blog as promised, I am more drawn to the basket itself (not least because we didn’t save as many of the girls’ shoes as I’d imagined through my rose tinted glasses!). When an object loaded with history and memories re-presents itself, the stories within it unfold…a particularly brutal break in the wicker is no longer the health and safety hazard it has assumed over the years since it became a mere container of sentimentality, it is a story of a boy and his older brother using the basket as a pretend rally car in a flock wallpapered, axminster covered living room of a family home in a grimy ’70’s steeltown; the boys crashing into the tiled mantle piece, much to the chagrin of their ever loving mother. The space in between the wicker strands takes on huge significance. How how old is that accumulated dust? If you scraped it off, would the lowest layer really be over 40 years old?

And then it reminds me how the power of an inanimate object can trigger a firecracker of memories and emotions. I begin to recall Heidegger’s thoughts describing an individual moving from regarding an object as purely functional to one invested with history, scenarios, nostalgia, epic journeys, toiling in the field, etc. That moment of realisation in which he claims ‘being’ to be most authentic, the ‘and yet…’ moment. I soon realise my thoughts are hopping around 70’s childhood and later transformational periods in life. Thinking about Heidegger reminds me of my friend at university, recalling that TV doc he did. Channel 4 commissioned him to travel the US investigating cults (the fools!). The most compelling scene of the series isn’t about any of the cults themselves, it’s when Steve and the film crew stop the car by the roadside in the desert so they can marvel at a lone tree of objects eerily tied to its brittle branches. The objects? Shoes! Sneakers, work shoes, boots, in all shapes and sizes and states of disrepair, gnarled and melting in the searing heat, hanging from their faded laces. Have I come full circle with all this I ask myself? Perhaps.

Why do we hang on to some things and not others? Why does a hoarder hoard? Perhaps the answer is, they never quite know. Perhaps Mary didn’t know? Maybe the truth of any treasured object has yet to reveal itself. Where are the hoarder’s doubters when the purpose of their hoarding becomes apparent? As absent as the hoarder finding a good reason to throw them out in the first place.

As for the girls’ shoes, how come we only have one of the first tinier than tiny baby shoes? What has become of the other? Landfill? Zoikes!

Posted by Liz

Moths In The Lumber Room

Another  collage by Michael Leigh inspired by one of Mary Greg’s letter to Manchester Art Gallery…see Snippet Number 5.

Snippet from the letters No.7

Four Keys from Mary Greg's collection

One of my favourite quotes from the letters…November 10th 1928

To Mr Batho from Mary Greg.

“…If a number of any set of things are put together they at once become more interesting – this is most of our collections become of any value – I began by buying a key which interested me by its fine work – a friend said ‘oh’ I have an old key I do not want you shall have it & so on until my collection as you know is a most valuable one – & so on with other things…”

Hazel

Table Runner

I have an idea to somehow put Mary’s spoons, hidden away for years in a drawer at Queens Park, back on the table. Inspired by the table runner that Mary sent out to the collection at Timaru in New Zealand I have been collaborating with weaver Ismini Samanidou on a table runner which uses a combination of  images of the spoons in the archive and clay spoons I have made in response.  We are still playing and sample making, exploring very subtle weaves and more dramatic combinations, trying to reference the worn surfaces and edges of the spoons, perhaps incorporating some text from the letters, maybe the spoon inventory.  Through all of this we are discovering the similarities and differences between cloth and clay and learning ways in which the two can be brought together.  It is proving to be a really stimulating project.

thumbnail sketches of early ideas

Spoons from the collection woven into cloth

Subtle weave with ceramic spoons nestling

shadow of spoon woven into cloth

Ceramic spoons over woven text

At this early stage we are playing with varying combinations of cloth and clay – clay spoons sitting on cloth surfaces, cloth spoons rolled into clay dishes, images of clay spoons and surfaces woven back into the cloth.  I like the notion of a seamless transition between the old and the new, the cloth and the clay, the analogue and the digital, the hand and the machine, and would like this to be reflected as the work develops.  Sharon

Modeling the idea on the table in cloth and clay