I opened the boot of my car the other day and a bag full of Bags For Life exploded out onto the pavement. I keep them in there and then forget to take them into the supermarket, then I buy more bags for life to fill with bags of shopping. There are some at home too, stuffed into a container bag for life, the mother bag for life, on the door handle on the back of the door in the kitchen. According to a brief Google search, it can take up to 1000 years for plastics to break down, turning into an eternity of micro plastics. My 18 Bags For Life will be floating around long after my bones have been absorbed back into the ground.
During the lockdown I walked up and down the Kent coastline with my children, one two, the other 7, watching teeth grow in, get chipped, start to wobble and fall out. My teeth are good for my age I suppose, no major problems. Discolouration, receding gums, that kind of thing. I walked up and down the chalk cliffs picking up shells and watching lumps of calcite fall down from great heights to be washed back into the sea. Shells, chalks, bone and teeth, grinding down and reforming all around me. Creatures in seashells with a lifespan shorter than mine to my right and great tall compressed chalk cliffs formed of skeletal remains on my left, dwarfing my years into insignificance. Occasionally these lifespans collide in alarming ways, look up ‘entombed animals’ and you will find cases of creatures, often frogs and toads, that have been discovered encased in rock or wood for long periods of time, either alive or mummified.
During one of the walks, I saw a seal washed up on the beach. There were two men in high-vis jackets standing nearby, making sure that no dogs came near it. I was touched by their tenderness and urgency, guarding the seal. Have you ever seen the shape of a seal tooth? It looks like a implement of torture; curved and serated to tear and gouge presumably. Very difficult to imagine teeth like that in sharp neat little rows in the mouth of that vulnerable seal. I spent some time Googling seals that evening, absentmindedly wondering who was saving them. Internet searches kept bringing me back to Selkie mythologies set in Orkney caves, seals that can shed their skin and transform in humans and back again: A kind of reusable death shroud, slipped back on after each shapeshift.
Flora Parrott
Flora Parrott is an artist and post-doctoral researcher on the European Research Council funded project Think Deep based in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University London. Parrott works in sculpture and textiles, she trained in Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art and The Royal College of Art. ‘I’m In The Bath On All Fours', is an ongoing collaboration with South African writer, Lindiwe Matshikiza has recently been shown at Eastside Projects in Birmingham as part of Sonia Boyce’s ‘In The Castle Of My Skin’ and in MIMA, Middlesbrough in 2021.
These textiles works are part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 863944, THINK DEEP).
