dry tears   1995 Kettles Yard Open, Cambridge

As with the performance piece Open End, this was made in the year following my mother's death. The work is in three sections and was shown at Kettles Yard disparately, inside the gallery, on the outside wall of the gallery and in the churchyard of Saint Peter next door. The work explored the character of clay in its many states: dry, wet and fired. A pile of my mother's handkerchieves, dipped in liquid clay, folded and left to dry. A sequence of black and white photographs, taken by my son Max Burrows, of me wiping my face with a clay soaked handkerchief. Handkerchieves dipped over and over again in liquid clay, fired and hung on the washing line.