Poetics

Artist’s secret thoughts

Essentially, Her Last Expectation in the Garden of Earthly Delights is a vignette about my mother interposed with a small part of the famous Bosch painting Garden of Earthly Delights (I wanted to see what Bosch would look like in three dimensions). My parents whom I love with all my heart were terrible drinkers and at some point, in my late 20's they had decided to give up and drink themselves to death.

One afternoon she (mother) banged on the floor of her bedroom, a call for me in the kitchen to come up and see what she (the queen) needed. Reluctantly, I made my way up to find a once handsome woman, sitting up in bed, the dirty lace of a four poster bed framing her profile as she proclaims without even looking in my direction 'Julie, I'm dying!' in a cracking old woman voice - The only thing that came to my mind was that forlorn wretched vindictive Dicken's character Miss Havisham, and it was too funny to me, and tragic all in one go. It was clear that she would kill herself with drink if she carried on, hence the title of my artwork.

The lace of the four poster bed in the sculpture is actually cut out of that very bed, and the figure surrounded by those hellish Bosch characters is an absolut vodka shot glass cut into a crown with gold leaf inlaid. I could go on... Thisis an older piece about an addiction which stained much of my life, even as a child.