Exhibition Text: The Foundling Museum

Exhibition: Finding Family, 17th March - 27th August 2023

A List of Holds

1. Three girls hold Bibles. The smallest holds her finger to her mouth.

2. Two girls hold hands. The butterfly evades the grasp of the girl in blue,

a hand that could crush it, should she try to caress it.

3. The child is held within the lap of the adult. Engulfed, encompassed,

at its mercy.

4. Paintings like this fail to hold my attention. The girl holds out her dress and

I wonder if she has ever felt cloth that is rough, with stains cemented in or

holes eaten out of it.

5. An apron holds in the billows of the dress, fluting out over the hips. Like the

people in uniform, the oil painting is a commodity to be displayed.

6. The small children hold each other’s gaze, hands held in their laps in a

foetal scrunch. The dragon looks ahead with one red eye. Paint clings to the

cardboard puckered with dimples. To bond is not to smooth things over but

to strengthen a connection with what is uneven.

7. Someone holds a camera, points it at the mirror to get a clear shot of Uncle

on the armchair. Uncle props himself up with an elbow to bash out a tune

on the small plastic keyboard. He grips the counter and leans towards the

microwave like a cat outstretched waiting to be fed.

8. Pockets hold his hands flush against his pelvis. The belt holds his jeans up

and his shirt in. The text holds the image accountable for the heartbreak

encountered. The pretence of family keeps me from something I am yet to

find, an experience of relationships free from obligation.

9. A hand wraps around the child’s shoulder. The hand attempts what the

sofa does without question. The sofa holds, the cat, the family, all of them

together, the fabric of day-to-day life.

10. One girl holds a jug, the boy holds a knife against the bread. I behold another

girl in the background. Pushed into the dark, yet still relevant enough to

paint. To be seen but not heard, that’s what they used to say.

11. The paint holds secrets, blurred facial features, the anonymity of those

beloved. Hands grace the face of the table. The table holds them there –

something to gather around, sit under, and talk over.

12. The woman holds my gaze. She looks like an alien. Rounded and smoothed

over in all the right places, which makes them look like the wrong places.

The hair holds tight curls, glued to her scalp with precision, precise like the

dagger collar on a blouse which has been ironed to prudish formality.

13. The mother holds her baby, her son is slumped against her. Her daughter

stands alone, supported only by the pavement. Flowers jut out of their fists.

14. I can’t imagine looking at a baby, knowing that it was inside of me and is now

outside of me, living off of me. My chest filling with milk to spill over into an

open mouth. Holding all that responsibility and storing it up like a cabinet.

Would I be mahogany or oak, or something less sturdy? An Ikea flat pack?

Something rigid and unyielding, a not good enough mother.

15. My genes are held in the double helix of my DNA. Twisted into shape,

wringing out my traits, forcing them to dribble down the generations. I have

my grandmother’s depression, my mother’s and brother’s too. I have been

spared from the wires, the loud buzz and the zap of my humanity being

muted. But not perhaps from the chokehold of generational trauma; the

throat left bruised and aching even when the hands are prised off.

16. The title holds me captive as I grapple with the idea of an absent presence.

If the present is here, and I am here, how can it be gone, lost, or forgotten.

I am absent, and the presence of I contradicts my being. It only pains me to

hold onto something that is not there.

Corresponding works:

1. Sophia Anderson, Foundling Girls in the Chapel, c. 1870s

2. Thomas Gainsborough, The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly, c. 1756

3. Adolf Tideman, Granny’s Darling, 1861

4. William Hogarth, The Graham Family, 1742

5. Emma Brownlow, A Foundling Restored to its Mother, 1858

6. Louise Allen, Thrown Away, 2017

7. Matthew Finn, Uncle, 1987-2014

8. Sunil Gupta, ‘Pretended’ Family Relationships, 1988

9. Chantal Joffe, Self-portrait with Esme and Spot, 2011

10. The Le Nain Brothers, Four Figures at a Table, c. 1643

11. Sikelela Owen, The Owens, 2019

12. Gillian Wearing, Self-Portrait as my Mother, Jean Gregory, 2003

13. Thomas Kennington, The Pinch of Poverty, 1891

14. Caroline Walker, Night Feed, 2022

15. Barbara Walker, Untitled (artist’s granddaughter, age 11), 2021

16. Ted Duncan, Absent Presence, 2006