A Mudlark Faces Her Past
From the desk of Majken Zein Sorensen
Hi there,
“After a lifetime of collecting artefacts from strangers’ lives, I’m finally ready to face my own past.”
Marie-Louise Plum is a full-time artist and mudlark – “one of those curious souls who scour the muddy banks of the River Thames at low tide, searching for lost and discarded artefacts that reveal fragments of London’s buried history,” as she puts it.
What she’s hunting is not the objects themselves, though, but the people behind; their stories, the lives they’d lived.
She’s had this interest since her childhood, which, she explains, was “a strange and shifting reality.”
Back then, she felt she needed something to hold on to, something that would remind her of the people in her life who came and went.
Collecting objects was a way for her to anchor herself.
“That instinct to hold on never really left me,” Plum explains, and so when she became an artist, she continued to gather things - now from the lives of strangers.
Plum researches her findings and traces their clues back to the people who once held them.
“A lemonade bottle, its vulcanised rubber stopper still faintly embossed with the name ‘Whiteleys’, leads me to the story of the department store mogul William Whiteley, fatally shot in 1907 by his alleged illegitimate son.”
She reveals that it’s probably been easier for her to deal with objects belonging to strangers than dealing with real people - or with her own past.
“My (..) therapist tells me I find human interaction overwhelming and confusing, so I substitute the emotional with the inanimate,” Plum tells.
On a recent journey to her childhood home, something changed, though. Plum realised that “The compulsion to hunt for fragments of strangers’ lives had ebbed.” Now she’s ready to look at her own past instead. “The urge to fill the gaps in my identity with objects dredged from the river has eased. For the first time, I feel able to look directly at my own past – no artefacts needed.”
Still, she visits the muddy banks of the River Thames, she says, although “less often and with lighter hands.”
A Mudlark Faces Her Past
THANK YOU
…for your spark
Watch video here: @david.pogran
GET ON A TRAIN
And, lastly, a gentle suggestion from me to you to turn off the screen, get out into the real world and do something (other than scrolling). Here's an idea:
*Check in at a station. *Take a train to somewhere.
Credit: trip between Oslo and Bergen with Bergensbanen.
FUN FACT: the Bergensbanen train journey is often shown in Norwegian tv during Christmas and New Year.
It's exceptionally popular. Allegedly 25% of the population are watching.
Until next time,
Majken xx
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things that make me wonder,
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and things that put a big fat smile on my face.
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WELCOME & enjoy!
Majken xx
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