Art, Eccentricity and the Jam Jar lids
“It’s a terrible shame about Janet’s Mother - the latest is she’s taken all the lids off the jam jars and stuck them to the kitchen wall. Doollally.”
I pictured all the silver, gingham and golden lids on the wall - arranged and adhered. Like a gallery. I remember wondering how she stuck them up and wondering what it looked like. I also remember thinking that it sounded lovely. In my mind’s eye - it looked like some ancient golden cloud. I imagined Janet’s Mum carefully arranging them and sticking them up - perhaps moving them around, making aesthetic choices.
I simultaneously knew that I absolutely SHOULD NOT be thinking this. This was THE WRONG thought. I was supposed to feel sorry for Janet. To regard her mother as disturbed - a madwoman creating great difficulty for Janet. The cultural soup was seasoning me. What I should have been experiencing was pity and caution when regarding such matters.
Danger
I suspect AKA dream up, with absolutely no evidence, the story that Janet’s Mum was:
1 - An artist
2 - An eccentric
3 - Neurodivergent AF
In another life, environment, family, cultural soup she may have been another Gaudi, the secret assembler of a shell grotto, or a Roman mosaic artisan. But here, in this enclave respectability, social aspiration and race for the middle, she was regarded a madwoman. And maybe she was…
Imagine
You have the urge to make art, to express through things and you look around your kitchen and find the golden circles and arrange them in a way that is pleasing to you on the nearest surface.
I really do remember wanting to see it, to meet her. To stick lids to walls.
NO!
STOP!
I still imagine what her mosaic would have looked like. I wonder how long it had been going on and how big it was.
I was a child overhearing these conversations - I needed them explained to me - I couldn’t get my head around he problem. A difficult child - nosy. Too interested. Precocious. As an adult I have more context for things like this. Janet’s Mum had always been difficult I think I remember. Had always had ‘problems’. I imagine her as a working class Grey Gardens kind of character. A Liverpudlian Edie. Would she have been in peri-menopause or dementia?
How I wish I could have been with her in the house when Janet discovered her masterpiece. And marvelled at it. Talked to her about it. Framed it. Inquired as to the significance of these expressions. Brought her bags full of lids and created more and more.
Perhaps she would have mosaiced the entire house.
The walls of the yard.
The local newspaper could have reported on this remarkable, hidden outsider art. They would discover books upon books of paintings, sketches, essays and poems.
An exhibition at the local library.
The house turned into a visitor centre.
“Who’d have thought it? I mean she was odd; troubled even, but such incredible creativity!”
In her death she would be regarded quite differently than in her life. This happens to many men - I link to a documentary below in which Jarvis Cocker reports on remarkable outsider art. Fascinating and frustratingly male. Who is allowed to be an outsider artist? Highly recommend and also I have questions. Untaming.
Yet no - as we are - old ladies with a lot; who are a lot; too large for the cultural soup; we serve as cautionary tales.
Unless…
Perhaps she was Bi-polar, although I much prefer the dead-name of this condition - Manic Depression. Bi-polar speaks to lab coats; laboratories; magnets; ordinary matters; Manic depression of billowing white nightwear, wide-eyed grins and wild untamed hair. Poetry. While I’d rather not romanticise these harrowing conditions, I can perhaps allow the same romanticism afforded to other artists and creatives, who are less wild with the mania. Afford them a humane dramatic persona, rather than or in addition to a clinical one.
I have only a myopic snapshot of this memory, although it made a marked impression on me. I suspect that this tale of Janet’s Mum’s dangerous jam-jar lid art was but one among a litany of incidents; this one being more benign but including more malignant manifestations of mind manias. Dementia? Alzheimer’s? Depression? ADHD? Autism? Or a Cluster B matter.
There are vague and fogged other sentences remembered about her being paranoid and believing fantastical things. Conspiracies. Maybe the jam-jar lids were a way for her to communicate beyond our realm, and Janet was fatigued with dealing with it and my Mum was deep in empathy and relaying this to another adult while I listened. I imagine Janet was worried, exhausted, taking my Mum as a confidante, who in turn shared these stories with my Dad.
Perhaps Janet had had to parent her Mother her whole life and this was yet another incident that added to her load.
Perhaps I romanticise her artistic endeavours; naive and ill-informormed.
Desperate artistic optimism.
Perhaps it is both things.
How lucky I am. What privilege to bear witness to these stories. Oral tradition. Ancient communication. To amass a collection of human ways of being. Learn about empathy, the ways people morph and change; decay, devolve, degrade, degenerate with time - their minds, their appetites, their expression. And how adults process and chew over things.
Us
Everything amplified and diminished. Parent-child relationships in adulthood - trying to put the puzzles together of these people who feel impossibly old and capable yet are just trying to work through the daily human experience.
Like me now
I have learned more about the human condition in the past three years of running a grief circle than I have in twenty years of coaching. More about human edges from working in pubs and restaurants as a young woman than I did in four years of studying Psychology and Biology - although I will say, that gave me the lens of intellect and reason through which I could work through and give context to stories. A wonderful privilege.
These men and women, engaging in the ancient oral tradition; generation after generation talking, discussing, reporting, gossiping in groups and working things out through story.
Oral traditions.
Timeless.
“Art is absolutely useless - it has no function. It’s more important than that”.
Stephen Fry
Interesting that each of the outsider artists episode one were men. I muse.
Outsider Art
Communicating with the aliens through jam-jar lids.
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