Fiona
Fiona is an artist and carer. Her mum Maria died in 2023 and her grandmother Philomena died in 1988.
Philomena and Maria were forcibly separated when Maria was two years old. Fiona never met her grandmother.
Fiona has created a body of work and an exhibition ‘Rendition’ about her family’s experience.
“Mum was a psychic and medium. She read cards above the local hairdressing salon.
One day, I came home from school and she was in this little cupboard in her bedroom. She was sobbing her heart out: “She’s gone, she’s gone.” She just had this feeling that her birth mum - Philomena - had died.
Philomena was supposed to get married but he left her at the altar. This was 1954. And so she was sent back to Ireland, to Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home.
Mum was adopted when she was two years old. No sign of consent, no paperwork, no nothing. They never got to see each other again.
Years later, Mum’s half-sister gave us a photo of Philomena holding Mum on the steps of Castlepollard. When we first met her, she told Mum ‘You were a much-loved and wanted baby.’
In the photo, Philomena is 19 years old. She only had 15 minutes with her baby three times a day for feeding. But somehow she managed to sneak this picture.
I like that she was rebellious enough to do that. I think I’ve inherited a bit of that spirit.
But it affected her. Philomena’s brother and his wife told us that she was heartbroken when she came to stay with them afterwards. She couldn’t eat or sleep.
It affected Mum, too. As a little girl, she would have these memory releases - visions of nuns and hearing a voice saying ‘I love you’. She didn’t know what they were.
Paperwork is everywhere, but it’s all locked away. You get different papers depending on which data protection officer you get on which day. There’s a machine-like bureaucracy to it; a coldness.
In some ways, Mum’s documents are so precious they could be made of gold. But in other ways, they’re a source of trauma.
That’s why I ended up making my own paper. I went to Ireland, to the place my grandmother was born. I collected daisies and red nettles growing near the well and I put them into paper.
I’ve made papers and used Mum’s fountain pen to write out the names of babies who died in Castlepollard. Mum said she found her mother’s love in nature. It speaks of this constantly regenerating life force; something with no beginning and no end.
Sometimes I plant seeds in the papers. Sometimes I draw on them. Subconscious, surrealist automatic drawings. They look like maps.
I’m world-making. I’m mapping connections beyond the patrilineage of a family tree. And I’m including the kinship of the natural world, too.
My paper-making is my attempt to interrupt the harms of separation and extraction they suffered.
The first paper I made was with Mum’s bandages and cherry blossom. Cherry trees were blossoming over my grandma’s grave when we visited. We could feel her through them.
I never met my grandma Philomena. My grief is a strange, displaced grief. I’m more familiar with it now, but it can still get me sometimes. I’ll light a candle and have a photograph there while I work.
It feels like I’m creating a potion. Making it a ritual helps.
“I believe grief and trauma can be a gift.
It can help us learn; help us create a new world.”
Forced family separation is such a difficult subject. If people haven’t got the time or the patience to understand it, it’s just a really sad story.
But it’s so much more than that.
You’ve got to live with something, compost it down and fully absorb it to be able to move forward with it. Grief can be part of you and not be too much. It doesn’t have to be this dark thing that’s separate to you; that might jump out when you least expect it.
You can absorb loss. You can create something better from it.
Thousands of women had their babies taken from them against their will. We can’t forget these histories. They have to be preserved, recorded.
I believe grief and trauma can be a gift. It can help us learn; help us create a new world. ”