In the Winter I rarely spend much time in my outside workshop. Its small, no windows, so no natural light. It can also be really really cold in there, and my bones just can't take that to the quite the same degree anymore. It's becomes this place where I dump stuff, to be sorted out, whenever. The sawdust gathering in ever larger golden drifts around my workbench. Evoking memories of playing in my Father's workshop, the pungent fresh smell of it, the sap and wood dust filled air. Some workshop tools I use were once my Father's. Though they never work in quite the same way in my hands. He was a very skilled joiner. I stand in his shadow, always feeling a bit the cack handed amateur.
But come the Spring the time for tidying up the workshop arrives. The first milder days when I can happily work in there with the door wide open. I've been planning quite vaguely in my mind a reorganisation. Adjusting the layout. Chucking away some of the stuff accrued, but never used in a month of Sundays. Because it is a tiny space, too tiny for surplus crap. Some of it I could relocate to the garage. But the current state of our garage? I can't bear to go in there anymore, either. That is for another time. First let's sort out the smallest room in Upper Sheringham.
I start working from top to bottom, just as my Mother taught me. Hoovering the cobwebs from the roof space and dust off the timbers. When I originally set the workshop up I made a small mezzanine type space out of planks. A place where I could store mount boards,paper and old portfolios. I was aware that the workshop had had some recent 'Winter guests'. It wasn't until I started to sort out the 'mezzanine' that I discovered quite how much damage these mice had caused. Plastic bags in shreads or with tattered edges, a foam garden knee rest chewed away like they were wood carving. Plus the usual black poo pellets scattered randomly like pepper corns. Yes, it was yuck bad.
Then I looked inside a corrugated plastic portfolio in which I'd kept some of my artwork, old art college work, some early primary school stuff. Unfortunately the tiny beings had also got in there too. Using it as their main chew, poo and pee palace. I never thought plastic could be that nutritious before. My heart slumped as I began teasing stuff out. So much if it ruined beyond keeping. I had to throw two black plastic bags of stuff away. What is left, I've just shoved in a large plastic board bag for now. I'll have to look through them again later, to see if they were really worth salvaging and preserving. Heart breaking? Yes it was.
Having uncovered this archival wreckage, I could only bear a morning of going through the pongy grimness of it. What more might there be to be discovered? By the end of the day I felt despondency settling upon me. Here was a bit of me, a bit of my experience and history already consigned to the dust bin. Its not that any of it was great art, but it had value to me, I had made it. Nor is this entirely sentimental attachment to the finished work, its more attachment to the creativity that went into them. Creativity, unsurprisingly, is strongly bound up in my sense of who I am.
The next morning I awoke even more struck by this. A few days before one of my Aunties, a favourite from my childhood, had died at the age of 98. An unspoken feeling of loss already hung over me. Of being just that bit more alone, as the surviving adults from my childhood years become yearly depleted, disappearing one by one. This appeared to be linked metaphorically with these mice nibbling away some of my creative history. Leaving only the regurgitated excrement of it behind.
Time itself nibbles away at our presence. The transience of everything we ever do. I watch TV programmes like The Repair Shop, and you see how objects come to embody or represent people, keep them imaginatively alive. Objects, however, decay as much as people do, and there aren't always highly skilled crafts people there to restore what has been lost. Nor relatives to remember and tell the associated tales. Objects. with the loss of their owners or creators, eventually become divorced from their back story. In the same way we are lost when our body and mind is no longer present. In the meantime, we are frightened by the empty space one day we will leave behind us.
No one wants to be forgotten, but it happens.
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