‘Letter’

Jem Stanley (2009) Excerpt DVD 14mins                                                                                                                                         Knitting the Blanket (2009 -) Excerpt DVD 60 mins mins

 
 

The work is about interconnections between generations of a family, the centre of it being a letter from my father to his sister in November 1940. This provided a graphic and detailed description of the events of the night of the bombings in Coventry on Nov 14 1940; the image of  the ruins of the cathedral has become an enigmatic symbol of the bombings during the second world war. It also provided an aspect of my father’s political character that we grew up with. I wished to preserve the contents of the letter in some way and to send it into the future, the idea of knitting blankets as a pattern from the text of the letter of these horrific events into something contradictory and  opposite , warmth, security, and also the passing on of a story, and to donate these to my daughter’s recently born baby son, my father’s great grandchild. This is the story, but hope that the blankets themselves transcend the literal narrative, and fit into a sequence of works whose context is historical and is projected  firmly into the present time as a personal interpretation. 

 
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