07 May 2006

behind the walls

On the first day of the residency I met the conservator who showed me some rather bedraggled scrappy looking wallpaper that consisted of many layers, painstakingly seperated to reveal design features from different eras in time.

I recognised a layer from the 60-70's which had a brown bamboo like pattern; the sort you get in forgotten bed & breakfast places. Every layer seemed to speak to me with another voice - of grandeur, parties around a piano, long rustling dresses, ash, maids, the stench of cigarette smoke, formica, plastic cups, boilers, faded curtains....

I was reminded of how I would observe my fathers DIY activities, in which he would be wrestling with a roll of anaglypta; fighting with the paper which was taller than himself in an effort to secure it to the wall with as few bubbles as possible.

The museum wallpaper set me thinking, and led me back to a radio four programme about the significance of shoes embedded in walls, as a sort of good luck charm. I found the following article on the internet.

The Slippers of Papillon Hall.

The now virutally demolished Papillon Hall was built in 1622 by the Papillon family. The large stone house was surrounded by a moat and at each corner of the roof was a flat lead paved area. A story is told that David Papillon (1691-1762) before his marriage kept a Spanish mistress, who was kept 'prisoner' in the east attic and took her exercise on the flat leads of the roof. This nameless woman is said to have died in 1715; there is no record of her death or of her place of burial, but the skeleton of a woman was found within the walls of the east attic during alterations to the hall in 1903.

A folklore tale tells that the nameless woman was murdered by Papillon who accused her of being a witch. At the moment of death, she is said to have uttered a curse of bad fortune on any owner who removed her slippers from the house. Whenever the hall was sold the slippers were handed on the title deeds to the new owner, except in 1866, when they were taken away to Leicester. The new family were said to have been constantly woken at night by unexplained loud noises and so the slippers were brought back and the noises ceased. The house was sold again and the new owner, Thomas Holford, lent the slippers (silver brocade with three inch heels and pointed toes) to an exhibition in Paris, life in the house became so unbearable that the family were forced to move out until the slippers were returned.

The next owner, Mr. C Walker, was so determined to avoid trouble that he had a special case made for the shoes with a padlocked metal grille keeping the slippers securely mounted above the fireplace. However, despite warnings, the shoes were removed during alterations to the house (during which the skeleton was found). Accidents immediately began to occur with one worker being killed by a falling brick and the men then refused to return to work.

The shoes were returned and safe until the second world war, when the hall was used as a billet for the American 82nd Airborne Division. The story continues with two separate incidents in which men who had taken slippers away were killed in action, though the missing slipper was returned each time. When the hall was deserted in 1945 only one slipper remained, but in 1951 when the hall was demolished the missing slipper was found under the floorboards.

The practice of burying shoes in walls was quite common. June Swann explains that the shoe was of significant value as it was like a fingerprint showing the inprint of the wearer. Shoes are also linked with fertility and authority, they can be seen tied on the back of wedding cars and are generally associated with good luck. But most of all they stand in for the person who is no longer there. What I like about this practice is the sense of ritual, and the secretiveness of the practice, and the possibility of others making the discovery. if anyone is interested in this practice take make a visit to Northampton Museum, where they have a wonderful shoe collection and refer to this practice, and present shoes found in fireplaces, a common place to put shoes, in order to enable the bad spirits to leave the home.


I have just read The Yellow Wallpaper - what a strange tale, its concerns a woman seemingly trapped in a large country house in which she is recouperating from a depresssive malady. The womans recounts the sense of lonliness and isolation, whilst her husband works away and her child is looked after by a carer due to her illness.

The woman tells the reader about the yellow wallpaper in her room, and gradually she becomes consumed by the wallpaper, which seems to take on a life of its own before her eyes. Its almost as if she actually becomes the wallpaper, with her subjectivity being eroded by the patterns and torn areas on the walls. I am not clear if the woman is a victim of her husbands need to possess and disempower her, and recreate a "mad woman in the attic" scenario, or if the woman is in control of her destiny, through her own telling of the story and her escape into childhood memeories, another and another world she constructs for herself.

I am not sure how these thoughts are relevant to the residency, but they feel like the process of making sense of the museum world, of disentangling, histories and almost making walls and the overlooked and hidden part of this history. I remember the need to tear at a piece of wallpaper or to pull at a scab, its like you want to know whats behind it, to expose the secrets, to know whats there, to be an archaeologist in ones home, to discover what is lurking behind the wallpaper.


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