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 shortly after Maria’s birth. 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 her 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.
She had to stay there for 50 days after her baby was taken away to be adopted. No sign of consent, no paperwork, no nothing. They never got to see each other again.
Years later, we were given this photo of Philomena holding Mum on the steps of Castlepollard. She’s 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 Philomena was rebellious enough to get that picture. I think I’ve inherited a bit of that.
But it affected her. Her sister told us she wouldn’t go in the lift when she lived in a flat in Tottenham because it reminded her of Castlepollard. She wouldn’t go near a priest.
And it affected my mum, too, even though she was only a baby. 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 papers. I went to Ireland to the place where my grandmother was born. I collected daisies and red nettles 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. Sometimes I draw on them. Subconscious, surrealist automatic drawings. They look like maps. I’m world-making; putting myself in a different place.
Sometimes I plant seeds in them. To see something growing into and out of the organic material of the paper; to see life coming from decaying matter - it’s magical to me. It gives me this feeling of aliveness.
When we visited my grandma’s grave, there were blossom trees. I took some petals and enmeshed them in paper with some of Mum’s bandages. It was my way of bringing them back together.
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. ”