No Heirlooms

Embroidered textile, 20 x 16 cm, Private Collection

It is so cold here we are huddled around the fire. Do you get free jumpers there like we do here?

It was obvious from the letters Ada wrote to her daughter Frances that the Lightfoot family was very poor. They were written on scraps of paper and pages from old exercise books. Ada mentions in her letters that they were receiving free jumpers (sweaters) which were presumably some form of charity handout.

This work bears witness to the family’s poverty. I used images of forks in this work as the family would probably only have owned everyday objects, and would not have had any valuable items to pass on to their descendants.

Detail

Detail