Below Morven Mulgrew, one of the 2024 SSW x Counterflows Caregivers Residency artists reflects on her time here. This residency was set up in 2020 to expand funded residency opportunities to artists who are also caregivers. The 2025 call out will be launching soon.
Words by Morven Mulgrew, images by Morven Mulgrew and SSW
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PART ONE:
MY CANDIDACY FOR SUITABILITY FOR THE DESIGNATED ROLE OF CARE-GIVER
The application for the residency said I wanted to explore the politics of respite. Or really, why I like to fart about making funny pots and unpolished jewellery. Why I revel in absurdity, take stupid ideas seriously, and enjoy applying the wrong process to the right material. I know that this is enmeshed into my life and my role as care-giver, but I find it hard to articulate. Writing this blog has been hard. I put it off. But I don’t feel like I can just describe my farting-about bit, without writing about the other bit. So here it is.
I side-eyed this residency for the last few years, watching it come and go, thinking I am a carer, that’s me, but then: but if I tell everybody, they will know. And after that: And maybe if they know, nobody will even care. It felt exposing to collide something personal, hidden, silent, unexplainable with my art friends and peers. I do not know if it is possible to understand me because this part of my life is completely invisible. How can you understand “lived experience” if you do not live it.
Also, in the carer Olympics I have no idea where I would place. It wouldn’t be on the podium. What about those with no capacity to apply to this residency? What about the people who were forced to give it all up 20,30,40 years ago and got left out of the game? The whole situation of describing yourself is completely contradictory, messy, non-possible, inadequate. Even the term carer is problematic to me: does it absolve society of adapting because the carer soaks up the extra labour? When this term is applied to us unpaid family members, I worry about that, that word actually slows the progression of equality, because I am invisibly absorbing an access need.
And, then, I didn’t not want to be disloyal to my sibling who I love. But I also wanted to be seen and understood.
So, I tumbled around for a few years, thinking : Should I apply? Am I carer enough? Is this a good idea?
However: I really, really, wanted to go to Scottish Sculpture Workshop.
I did apply. I got it. Here is my blog.
I am a sibling carer. It’s nothing, and its everything. My brother’s disabled. He needs 24/7 care. I am describing this because caring is a relationship, and that’s the other person in the relationship. My fucking amazing brother. But in fact it’s not a duo relationship. Everyone in my family takes on different roles in relation to each other at different times. My dad in primary, my sister, my partner, my kids. My mother when she was alive. We are an expanded and amorphous family as well as standard, average and everyday (sort of).
Being a sibling carer is a waiting game but it’s also active right now and since I was 8 years old. It shaped my life in every way. It’s very easy and very hard. My caring responsibility is physical and personal and emotional and administrative. One of my roles is to be in 2nd place. But then again, who cares? The pressures placed on him are so much vaster. I have a fist-sized stone to deal with, his a burning house. But I still have the stone.
It’s very difficult to write about. I am not disabled. I want to fight for disability rights. Not all of my life is caring, but a big part of it is. I’m really just a sibling. But then I’m not. My situation is unusual. It’s confusing to me. It’s weird.
PART TWO:
RATTY GOES TO LUMSDEN
Week One.
On Monday I drive up to Lumsden without the right amount of pants or socks and no food, I lose a ring in the car somewhere which I still haven’t found. I am very badly prepared. I stop off at co-op and attempt to buy “food” which includes onions, garlic and more stuff. I get to SSW and immediately hide in my room for 24 hours. On Tuesday I emerge and start typing out texts from my stash of 10-year-old crud-encrusted notebooks, covered in old pear and clay, just as I have promised to do in my application. Over the next few days this transcribing develops into a furious endeavour, I keep getting into bed to watch some laptop tele but then thinking of something else and open up the SSW doc to ratchet out more words, and then straight from bed in the tartan PJ bots the next morning to fire out another “big idea”. I write 8000 words in a week, 3.k of them are some sort of play. I read a play every day that first week (plays are short) and in the evening I watch King Lear and a 3-part documentary on Elon musk. I don’t speak to anyone, I run out of socks by Thursday. I make a shit-ton of pottery, try plasma cutting and largely avoid the welding machine.
Nutritionally, by the Wednesday of this first week I have honed my cuisine down to 2 crumpets with blue cheese, 3 times a day, supplemented by as many pears as I can hoof down my gullet. I bring the stuff from co-op home on the Friday.
Week Two.
By week 2 I realise you can get everything you need (including socks) from the garage shop in Lumsden and don’t bother stopping at co-op on the drive up. I toddle off there for macaroni pies, ice lollies, tins of tomatoes, noodles, sweety bags, crisps, frozen vege burgers, toys for the kids. They have blue cheese. Week 2 is just before Christmas and I make a Xmas tree costume out of socks and go a big walk on a country road whilst recording myself singing with a big selfie stick. A white van man stops and asks me if I am a mummer. I make more pottery. It’s so easy for me to be in the ceramics room. So mindless in a way. So relieving.
Week Three
By this point I have offset any worries about nutrition from the crumpet diet with bottles of ginger and turmeric shots from the big Asda, which I down straight out of the bottle by the bedside each morning. I eat a lot of crisps and pears (I like pears). I bring up my mortar gun extruder and all my reclaim in the back of the car. I extrude about 30kg of reclaim in 2 days. It’s quite amazing what you can achieve when you live as a rat. In the excitement of the clay, I’ve forgotten about the play. I listen to an 8-part documentary on Elon Musk. I meet Juliana, the other care-giver residence-ee, and immediately feel at home with everything I need or want to say to her. The dark stuff I’d never write down here, the stoopid stuff, the love stuff. A completely different situation, but somehow we know each other’s bits and pieces, or some or enough of them to count anyway. We go out for a big posh lunch in a fancy hotel.
Week 4
It’s the big wood fire week and that overtakes everything, so I don’t even open the laptop, the play abandoned in last November. There’s no blue cheese anymore. I use old butter from past residency weeks and it’s rancid, but not that bad if you melt it.
On the Wednesday, Amy (ceramics tech and a real solid gal) and I get up at 6am to start the woodfire that we planned to do since last October. We meet in the coffee station at 5.45am, get the fire going and immediately I realise, this is going to be a really boring day. Perhaps wood-firing is sitting on a camp chair and throwing logs into a fire box ALL FUCKING DAY. This is not an activity I can cope well with. I cannot shoot the breeze.
Side activities commence. I want to make a big tarp banner for the national day of action against the disability cuts. However I didn’t bring a tarp, I can’t source a tarp, and the only gaffer tape available in the big Asda is the really expensive guerrilla/gorilla stuff. And I’m scared of being honked at by the passing cars in case they disagree with my tarp. I’m referencing my mum’s tarp saying YES during indie ref, but no way would she have caused herself this much drama over it.
Anyway, it turns out that I get a lovely old mucky green one from Alexis (partner of lovely Sam – the programme & partnerships director) And I tape it up. WELFARE NOT WARFARE. And then Rhuaridh (technical manager and also epic metal dude) attaches it safely to the wall for me. It looks mint. I don’t know how it all comes together before lunch. And no one honks at me.
Amy keeps chucking the logs on. The temperature keeps creeping up.
We have microwaved haggis and neeps for on the camping chairs lovely Liz (finance assistant) brought in for us and soon it is getting very hot in the kiln. We are chucking the logs in and they are bursting into flame in mid-air. The flame is kind of whomp whomp whomping out the portholes like a wave.
Juliana arrives and immediately introduces some cheekiness into the proceedings.
Some ceramic MEN arrive and give advice, which Amy and I ignore, politely.
We want to get the cone 8 melted. Everyone gets bored or goes to bed. Me and Amy stare at the pyrometer. Numbers go up and down. Up,up,down,down. Down one more, throw a log on, shut the door. Repeat that. We just stand together, quietly. There is aurora borealis but it doesn’t matter, we just watch the pyro. I feel content.
The last night of the week I get a curry and aperol spritz with fellow residents and get pissed. I do impressions of how you relax on a camel – DROMEDARY…..BACTRIAN…. with the resident cat, Ali.
And that’s what happened when Ratty went to Lumsden.
Thank you to everyone up at SSW and Counterflows for acknowledging care-givers, permitting us to acknowledge ourselves, and for all the support that you gave me. It was so brilliant.
