Locket with Hair

This is a very personal piece

It contains a lock of hair from each of my three children

Their future is unknown

One child has already gone

The hair is the only physical part of him left

Commissioning this work was part of the healing process

I wanted the locket to sit over my heart

The locket will never be opened

Fiona Kurnadi

'...memory is a wardrobe.'

And to fine words correspond fine things, to grave sounding words, an entity of depth. Every poet of furniture - even if he be a poet in a garret, and therefore has no furniture - knows that the inner space of an old wardrobe is deep. A wardrobe's inner space is also intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody."

'the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture. It is not opened every day, and so, like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door.'

Gaston Bachelard

The Poetics of Space

 

 

The wardrobe had no keys!...No keys had the big wardrobe

Often we used to look at its brown and black door

No keys!...It was strange! Many a time we dreamed

Of the mysteries lying dormant between its wooden flanks

And we thought we heard, deep in the gaping lock

A distant sound, a vague and joyful murmur.

Arthur Rimbaud,

Les Etrennes de orphelins.