Blood, Shit and Cum Mixed Media Painted Intervention 2024/25 RCA 1.5m x .5m
1964. M2 Motorway. Torrential rain.
Aunt Evelyn is emigrating to the USA. David, my Step Father, is driving us to Heathrow. The car is an adapted Citroen DS with seven seats he had borrowed from a friend. There are nine of us in the car. Evelyn, her small children Mark and Miranda, me, my two year old brother Stuart, my Mother, David, my Grandmother and Grandfather. 5 adults and 4 children.
David is 24 years old. Driving too fast in the torrential rain, he hits a a sheet of running water and aquaplanes over the central reservation into oncoming traffic. He crashes head on into a dentist travelling south who is immediately killed. I am sitting on my Mother’s lap in the front passenger seat. Upon impact I hit the windscreen, through the glass, out of the warm car, into the cold rain and onto the wet verge.
Silence. My skull smashed. Lying in the grass. Rain on my face. I remember hearing my Mother’s voice.
“I think he’s dead.”
No, I’m not. I thought. I’m not dead. I’m alive.
I remember the ambulance. Sitting opposite my aunt. Her legs were bleeding. There was a lot of blood. Over all of us. My clothes were sticky with blood. I’m wearing tartan trousers. The ambulance was just a van with broken people sitting on benches opposite each other.
We all survived the accident. There were so many of us in the car, packed like sardines. No seatbelts.
I remember telling the nurses at the hospital I didn’t sleep in a cot at home. I slept in a real bed.
I stayed in hospital for 20 weeks. I have no recollection of those months in hospital.
Four years later I am staying with my Grandmother. I am 8 years old. My Grandfather had died of an asthma attack beside her. She set the table before we went to bed. The house always smelled of apples. I liked the room I stayed in when I stayed with her. I can hear her downstairs preparing breakfast.
The wardrobe was assembled from odd elements. A deep shelf hung with a curtain made of orange linen, patterned with black bull reeds. I loved rooting through her old things in the wardrobe.
Past her summer dresses and winter coats, buried deep under the shelf I found opaque garment bags. As I unzipped them I recognised immediately what they were. My dead Grandfather’s tweed suit covered in dried blood and mud. My own tartan trousers from the accident similarly covered in dried blood and mud. In all of the garment bags hidden at the back of the wardrobe were the clothes we were wearing the day we survived the terrible accident on the M2 Motorway.
I told my mother. When I returned, the bags were gone.
The next project I set myself at the RCA was to unpack the secrets of the wardrobe.
Over my Dead Body 24/25 RCA Mixed Media
Over My Dead Body 24/25 RCA Mixed Media
Blood Shit and Cum 24/25 RCA Mixed Media
