FIONA KIRKWOOD
1949
South African Republic
A HEART DIVIDED. 2011. Digital printing, embroidery, plaiting, video. Installation
“A Heart Divided” attempts to narrate the universal story in today’s world of the effects of globalization where many people, including myself, have grown up in a family in which the parents come from two different parts of the globe and different societies and cultures.
The work also talks about the self divided by this background, never really being one thing or the other nor quite belonging anywhere and attempting to integrate these two parts by living life on two continents and moving backwards and forwards between them. I was born in Scotland of a Scottish father and a South African mother and then emigrated alone to South Africa as a young woman. Since then I have always retained a link with Scotland and now have a flat in Edinburgh.
I have chosen to use my hair as a metaphor, a marker of my identity, DNA and personal growth. Hair is renewed in repeated cycles, indicating the repetition of this cycle in my own life in terms of maintaining contact with my two worlds.
The installation, featuring a collection of suspended hair panels (digital print), a prominent timeline (embroidery) and a film, embraces the main phases of my life. The hair panels show the contrast and complexity between the gentler, calmer, Celtic background environment of Scotland and the African, edgier, more dramatic, vibrant energy of South Africa.
The timeline is embedded with small symbolic iconic textile images/objects/ embroidered drawings, to reflect such episodes as an embroidered textile made for my birth by my Scottish grandmother; my first journey by sea to South Africa and back to Scotland as a child; my great, great grandfather’s role in shaping the South African political history; my mother’s suitcase filled with treasures of her South African past and her photograph albums from South Africa; a Scottish doll; a South African doll; a drawing of Table Mountain in Cape Town, drawn by my South African grandfather; Edinburgh Castle in Scotland, still close to my present Scottish home; the Glasgow School of Art, where I initially studied; tartan-the traditional textile of Scotland; the emblematic thistle and the protea flower– icons of two different lands; apartheid to post-apartheid and my personal experiences of this and meeting Nelson Mandela; Zulu culture, Gaelic and Zulu languages; airmail letters; flags and traditional music.
The film footage expands on the timeline and shows me in both countries talking about my life.
