TOWARDS AN IMAGE OF MYSELF is a multi-media autobiography at the heart of the artist’s 1986 installation entitled FAMILY ALBUM. Both works paint a picture of the artists childhood growing up in the East End of London and share the death of her uncle from Leukemia at the age of 27 when she was 8 years old and the profound effect it had. She shares the story of her grandmother who raised children during the bombing of East London also known as the Blitz as a single mother and her mothers teenage pregnancy with the artist at the age of 16. The multi-media book has blown-out photocopied family album photographs use as collage, some pages with lace, buttons and pins & needles as reference to her grandmother and great grandmother who were both seamstresses. The original typed text pages of the book were created using an early 1960’s typewriter. The work won the Julian Sullivan Prize in 1986.

After Alan’s death there were now five women living in the flat, my nan, mum, her sister and Jacky and I.

I continued to paint and draw.

My mum’s sister after leaving Morpeth school went to work in an office in Holborn, she was also doing a Saturday job helping a friend Chrissie at ‘Downtown’ clothes shop at Roman Road market. And after a while I was taken there to help out, I got £1.00 a week pocket money from there. I remember saving up two weeks money to buy my sister a nurses uniform from the toyshop, it came to £1.50 and with the remainder money I bought a pack of 20 colored felt tip pens, my prize possession.

Roman Road market has always played a prominent part of our family life. The market is open Tuesday and Thursday mornings and Saturday all day. Every Saturday my mum and nan would take my sister and me there, come winter or shine. The main thing I remember as a child is the smell of roasting chestnuts and the No.8 bus stop where we walked to wait for the bus. Our toes numb with cold we’d watch the cars drive by and fantasize about driving in them, no more waiting for the bus, which when they did come always came in three’s.

Afterwards, when we got in, we would take off our shoes and sit by the gas fire in the living room to thaw our toes, then unpacking the bags.

We always had loads of fruit and we always managed to get through it in no time

I’d never thought anything about not having a ‘normal’ family with a father around until the day at primary school when a teacher illustrated on the blackboard my lack of a father. I don’t think I really cared about not having one until then. After that I didn’t really care after all we were ‘clean’.

There women did play a big part of my growing up, after all when my  uncle used to come up on Saturdays from cabbing all he seemed to want to do was watch football on TV and eat cheese sandwiches.

Sunday mornings was Brick Lane market, seeing the animals and eating bagels. Seeing all the animals down there was as good as going to the zoo. There were snakes, rabbits, tortoises, birds, puppies and kittens. And it was wonderful to see all the old railway arches filled with birds of all sorts and all their different colors. Though we were never allowed to buy any pets, except at one point in time we had two budgerigars that my sister used to let out for freedom.

I had a yellow budgie, who would pick up pins from my grandmothers pin cushion and give them to her, a marvel.

In our kitchen there has always been a sewing machine on the table, it used to be an old treadle Singer until my grandmother got an electric Brother. All our clothes were made for us, little dresses. The sewing machine has always been the most prominent thing in our flat, and since I can remember we were taught to sew. My nan always had neighbors and family to do alterations for them or make things, this was a way she made money for us.

There was and still are bits of cotton all over the place and bundles of alterations to be done.

I made my first school skirt when I was eleven and could also change an electrical plug by that age.

When I was twelve things began to change, my mother had met another man and had decided to take over my great aunt’s house in Tomlin’s Grove in Bow. My great aunt Bet had worked as Kitchen Supervisor at Morpeth school, in my first year there during breaks I could go to the kitchens and she would give me that days pudding. The next year she retired out to the country to her son’s house. I decided at that time I wanted to continue to live with my grandmother at the flat, so my sister Jacky and mum moved to Tomlin’s Grove and I stayed with my nan.

Jacky was then in her first year at Morpeth school. So I was seeing my both her and my mum each day. My aunt Sheila had also moved out to live with a man.

So there we were just me and my grandmother. I spent my time either upstairs in my room drawing or downstairs making things with my nan. I was brought up with the attitude, maybe not even an attitude but a belief that women were able to do and succeed in doing anything a man could. We were taught at an early age how to decorate, hang wallpaper, change plugs etc.

I also spent a lot of time sewing and using the machine. My nan had been taught to sew, hand sew by her mother. She great grandmother had been a Court Dressmaker. She’d had nine children and lived in Bow. My grandmother at school had been one of the three girls to sit and pass a training exam, only one of the girls that passed could go on to do work training and that was a girl called Lillie Hussie. She was an only child. My grandmother family weren’t able to afford to send her to the training and instead ha dot go out to work at the age of fourteen. She went to work at the Black Cat cigarette factory in Kentish Town, where her elder sisters were already working. All the children were giving their wages back into the family. In return my great gran would make the girls clothes to wear, and with the pocket month the girls got they would save to buy shoes and matches handbags and gloves.

So the use of a sewing machine and hand sewing has been passed on through the family, even my nan’s sons are able to sew and make clothes.

Some nights my nan and I would tidy the draw and tins in her wardrobe were all the cottons were kept in the tins would be lace, zips, ribbons, velcrose and other in the other tins would be buttons. After awhile of use things in the tins would become tangled and messy and we would sit and tidy them up with a cup of tea of course, and use the time to talk. we spent some of the time with jokes, some serious talks, some of nature and some of sad talks, sometimes we would argue and hurt each other, but those time were very rare.

I enjoyed my nan’s company and still do. In a way she is my ideal feminist though she would never call herself such. “You know me Den, I’m a woman’s woman, not a man’s woman”. And she is, she is a strong woman and of a strong mind, after all she brought up five of her own children on her own and helped with the grandchildren. She now has two great grandchildren with another due this summer.

She cares for all her family, she cares that they are happy and to her happiness is having food in the house and warmth. And in these things we are all rich.

My mother from moving to Tomlin’s Grove later got married and moved again to Cambridge Heath Road in Bethnal Green. Nine years ago she took over the shop that was beneath her flat. She built up the shop form nothing, first in secondhand clothes, progressing finally to a beautiful little gift shop.

She shop has always been like a meeting place for various people in the community, a place people would come to tell their problems and their accomplishments. People wold stay for hours, sometimes all day drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. She was never into selling things, though if you did want something you could buy.

And through this my mothers marriage was beginning to crumble, not through any fault of her own. She began to look ill and tensions were rising in her home, she made for her and my sister. Luckily for her the man she married spent a lot of time away, out of London with other women. By this time I think she was beginning to take hold of her life, and spent a long and painful time doing this.

During that time she took my sister and I to Ibiza, Spain on holiday. The resort was out of season and mosts things were shut, the weather was bad and so was my mother’s nerves. She never talked to us of the problems she was having, through all of us at some point feel weak.

When we returned, the tensions continued and she was a looking worse. Then finally she made the break from him, though in return he took every last penny she had saved for us.

She’d never been one for spending money on herself, she’d always tried to give Jacky and I everything, and also for us not to make the same mistakes as she thought she had. Her husband basically screwed her right up. He was the sort of man who made a living living off women. He stripped her of everything.

After that time she found a friend in somebody that cared for her, she’d left the shop and flat and had gone to stay with him in his house. Jacky at this point had come back to live with nan. Mum hadn’t left an address were she was, which was probably the best thing she had done. She spent the time reassessing her life with somebody that was willing to listen.

Then trouble began to happen at my nan’s according to my aunt Sheila, my mum’s younger sister. A woman never to be trusted, a woman that would sell my grandmother, to gain credibility with her new posh friends. She’d dropped her east end accent and now spoke barrister language and never forgetting to pronounce her “H’s.”

Nan at this point had been taken on a holiday abroad by her niece and sister.

Sheila in the few years of becoming an up and coming posh cow too good for the likes of us, already none of her brothers spoke to her, and as long as I can remember, always, had never spoken to my mother. She never like Jacky and me either, and till the day Alan died never spoke to him. But was the loudest screamer when he did finally die, according to my grandmother.

At one point when my mother was in hospital for an operation, she’d gone in and shouted the my mother should have died under the anesthetic. Such a nice well mannered woman.

So here’s my mum, just breaking from one relationship and feeling fragile, then along comes Sheila and informs me I have to leave my nan’s flat – get out and don’t come back, and this included my sister.

So Jacky and I with nowhere to go, end up bombarding my mum’s new found friend with our company. Living now in Barkingside, Essex.

There were a number of teething problem, he’d never had to put up with two young females roaming his house, and was unsure of us as we were of him, were his intension’s good?

There were problems, Jacky being just fifteen, me in my teenage depression at the age of seventeen and in my second year of art school. Jacky from there managed to get a live-in job at riding stables in Waltham Abbey, Essex. I had nowhere to go so I took over my mothers flat above the shop.

My mum and her new friend Michael, who is Police sergeant at Bethnal Green police station, began to develop a really caring relationship with my mother, and he himself was just coming out of a divorce. Eventually, they sell his house and move to a house in Hackney.  My mother begins to concentrate on the shop again.

My mother put into the shop everything she could. Together they began to change the face of the shop. Gone were the muddy browns and those colors were replaced by bright red and blue.

She worked six days a week and on the evenings and weekends, and together they were rebuilding their new house into her first real home with someone who cared for her.

Jacky at this time had decided that she was unhappy at the stables and she wanted to leave. She returned, this time to mum and Michael’s new house to a room of her own.

Again their were teething problems, I suppose Jacky was unsure of just the she wanted in life.

A few months later, after being on the ‘Dole’, she managed to get a job helping  to teach mentally handicapped adults.

The job brought out in Jacky all the caring in the world she had for her new students. She was angry at the way some of the teacher at the institution didn’t seem to give a “shit” about the students. And she was bubbling with energy to change it.

She spent her nights crying about the treatment her students were getting. One woman some woman years had lost all her family in a car crash. The woman who had become depressed, so doctors instead of taking the time to acknowledge her depression, spent the time giving her uppers and downers. Jacky saw her history report and was sickened by the arms length of tablets the woman had been given.

The institution was now going to be closed and the patients were going to be moved to mental hospitals.

And now Jacky had nowhere to go. She tried applying to various schools, but they were also having money problems. So now the only alternative was again to go onto the ‘Dole’…..and to spend her time every two weeks on Tuesday mornings going to Kingsland Road DHSS to write her name on the dotted line………….