I remember as a child being told there was somebody in my family we were not to talk about so I was not surprised to find my my grandmother’s grandmother listed as an inmate in an asylum in census records. I went on to discover three generations of women affected by what may or may not have been mental illness.

The first was Jane who drowned herself in the 1860s. She left three infant daughters, two of which, including my ancestor, ended up in asylums. Jane’s granddaughter Delia was in a workhouse when she wiped her nose on her sleeve and became uncooperative. She was put in the same asylum as her mother and died there decades later having never left.

I wove Hush as an antidote to the silence around these women. The figure on the left is Jane , the river a reference to her drowning. She is dropping three acorns representing her daughters. They’ve become lost in the patten of the skirt and I like that you have to seek them out as I did uncovering their stories. Jane holds an upturned goblet symbolic of her discarding her life, and in the rim are the birthstones of my grandmother, my mother and me as her descendants. The second figure is Delia, her goblet is undecorated she had no descendants, she is batting away or brining near a bird who looking to take her goblet. In the background is a town representing sanctuary, peace, heaven, barred to them by the river and their circumstances.

​