BASKET & NORA
The studio was vast and Nora was making tiny, matchbox-sized sculptures. Life felt faintly ridiculous. There was a certain wrongness with everything. This malaise deepened each time she looked out of the window at people striding down the street. She imagined lives full of purpose, of meetings, of worthy causes fought and objectives met. She did not imagine these people hating their work or feeling lost or that they were grieving. Her days melted one into another. She woke, she dressed, she drove to work, she parked the car. And again Nora found she was parking the car. But this time, inspite of being an accomplished reverse parker – less so a driver, she struggled to get close to the curb. She got out of the car. Trapped under the wheels was a shopping basket. It was flattened to the point of looking more like a drawing of a basket. Her immediate thought was ‘I’ll never make anything that beautiful’ but this was quickly tempered by knowing her mother would also have seen beauty in the malformed metal. The day was May 16th, 1993, a year since her mother had died.
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