‘THE TROUSSEAU’
Screenprint on cartridge paper.
Screen print of my trousseau, which was passed to me by my mother and to her by my grandmother. Also called the ‘bottom drawer’ where household linen were stored in preparation of a girl’s marriage, with a bundle of linen or clothing, ‘hope chest’, ‘dowery chest’ and ‘glory box’!
Using her own needlework, constructing a trousseau was for the working girl (maybe working in the fields) the equivalent of saving for marriage. The trousseau was used until the 1950s but mine, in Italian ‘corredo’, was stoked up until the 1970s. I took it to the UK eventually more as a memory of my original home and the Italian diaspora to which I belong and to remind me of the past, of absence, and of my presence.
Past and presence do not mirror directly, Jacques Derrida, (French philosopher 1930-2004) believes and past leaves a trace despite being absent
Rather, that the mark of the absence of a presence, the absence of the original, and our knowledge of thought and experience’ leaves trace, which is not simply a mark of its non-being, but rather a sign that something was there in the first place, even if it can never be fully present.
