Planet Creature and After Maeve

Frank Coughlan and Robyn Brady are parents of Maeve who was killed in a road accident, at age 10, in November 2003. Jan Cattoni is a friend and documentary film Director of After Maeve: a film about the family and Maeve's friends following her death. The film is generating much interest internationally. This blog is for Frank, Robyn and Jan to offer thoughts as the film and the Planet Creature website are viewed by audiences in different countries.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Children's Art 3: My art after Maeve ctd


 The second major piece of work I did with Raquel was about 8 months after Maeve died. Having returned to my halftime work in the emergency dept at 2 months, relatively successfully, I had subsequently taken a month off to paint half the house with my husband, during which time I also wrote poetry and spent some time on Stradbroke Island. It was a very reflective time and after this time, returning to work was more difficult, not for the reasons people expected (confronting trauma) but because I was struggling with the meaning of what I was doing, particularly in consultations over issues that seemed disproportionately petty. My boss sent me to a psychiatrist,whom I ambivalently consulted over a few months, insisting that I did not have a mental illness, 'just' grief, all the while continuing to attend Raquel's children's classes .

(To her credit, the psychiatrist sent me straight back to work.)

In the work shown here we 'children' were invited to construct a painting in which there is a dialogue between two famous artist's styles. Mine was a dialogue between a fantastic world of Miro style flying birds outside my windows and i don't remember whose style inside. I worked on it over a month or so in layers. At first I was really only interested in the bright creatures outside the window in that far away, make-believe but maybe reachable world. The inside was sparsely furnished and dull, although the guitar and mandolin did have something...

The psychiatrist was interested in the interior and she suggested simply that I explore this further. As I did during my art time I became particularly and deeply attached to the sofa. I loved its colour, pattern, oldness, comfortable deep cosiness, bottom pleats, broad arms,  worn areas... the fabric reminded me of 50s curtains from my 60s childhood... I worked and re-worked the sofa in response to Raquel's tips on how to use shading and pattern to give it depth. I also liked the big bodies of the instruments, re-inforced by the application of domestic brown paper and silk ties from the hospital. I worked on the floor and the wallpaper and spent a long time on the lamp. The astute will recognise the furry cat's tail in bottom left.

By the time i 'finished' the painting the outside seemed gaudy and uni-dimensional and the inside rich and full of meaning.

What I perceived happening during the two months was a movement away from a fragile and potentially dangerous complete immersion in 'the beyond' and the difficulties in its compatibility with ordinary life, to an awareness of the great resounding richness and depth of my ordinary domestic life, albeit coloured by the strange and wondrous sights beyond, (and by the cat, present but 'just out of reach') .

I called the painting, 'while my guitar gently weeps'.

Children's Art 3: My art after Maeve



After Maeve died, Raquel let me participate in the small children's art class we still attended with Tara. The three of us were all a bit numb, I think, and flying by the seat of our pants, as one often is at the cutting edge of life. I know that Raquel cared enormously for Maeve and for me, and I know that she felt that being in the class would probably be helpful to me, that she wanted me to have the chance to grieve through the medium of art, although this was never overt.

The first project 'the kids' were doing was an earthenware bust: African, Grecian etc. I sat on the child's chair at the low table and worked the gritty clay, and what appeared under my hands  was... the baby Maeve's head, slippery with water, as she had emerged from between my legs nearly eleven years earlier, eyes wide open, into Frank's waiting hands. It was baby Maeve's little head, and also all the hundreds of babies heads I have been privileged to hold as a paediatrician, have cradled, feeling their unique energy ...

I had not intended to do a bust of Maeve, but there she was emerging through the medium of touch, the first sense; water and mud, the first elements; and the tears began to flow from my eyes, and I sat in the middle of the children's class weeping and moulding and weeping and moulding, and Raquel moved nearer but didn't interrupt my work or ask me to explain what was happening.

And that was essentially what happened at the classes, which I attended for about 9 months. Once 'the kids' activity was to make a mexican 'retablos' (memorial shrine) out of plaster: Raquel may or may not have had my journey in mind- but I shied away from the overt memorial- it was never completed, although I used the ideas in the 'bumblebox' we made as a memorial activity at school.