September 2004
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Ana Susanj
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Clare McCracken
The Payne Family - an installation
My Great Aunt, Amy Elizabeth Cathcart Payne, moved from her house in Hawthorn to live with my family when I was 10 and she was 93. My mother and I cleaned out her house and moved her belongings with her. As we began going through every thing we discovered that my great aunt was a collector, a hoarder and a keeper. She had collections of everything, from empty boxes to old tram tickets and because she was the last surviving member of a large family of seven, she had also hung onto various collections made by her brothers, her sisters, her mother, her grandmother and her grandfather, most of whom had also been great collectors.
By the time I had come into the world Amy and her sister Nell were the only two members of the family still alive and Nell had died when I was still quite young so I knew very little about my relations, including my Grandmother. As my mother and I sorted through the things, and worked out who they belonged to and what their story was, I began to have an insight into the different family members’ lives and gradually, I began to discover the different personalities that made up the family block. I learnt about my great, great grandmother Elizabeth, who married a ship captain and found herself in Japan as one of the first western women to enter the country after they opened up the borders to the West. She had left behind well polished diaries, a sewing box and a neat pile of post cards and photos. I also learnt about Amy’s two brothers, George and Bill who had left behind various certificates, surds and medallions from their years of service, demonstrating the importance of the military to their lives. Amy’s sister Nell, a very generous woman with a photographic memory, had left behind the most incredible collection of sewing equipment, fabric and cottons from her days as a seamstress. There were piles of correspondences written between the members and thousands of other small things that built upon each other to tell me what each person was like. My mother, who had been brought up in this environment of collecting gathered the items together, ordered them, and took them to our house where she filed them away with her collection of family memorabilia, which lives beside her collections of swap cards, coins and stamps.
For this project I wanted to represent abstractly and figuratively four collections - all of which come from the same close family group, a mother, father, sister and brother. Through the representations I am hoping that the viewer will get some type of insight into the individual’s personalities and judge the differences between each relation as well as their role within the family group and leave considering the importance of their own collection to their identity.
Artist: Clare McCracken