The Matisse Stories - Antonia S. Byatt [21]
And she feels something else, looking at Sheba Brown’s apparently inexhaustible and profligate energy of colourful invention. She feels a kind of subdued envy which carries with it an invigorating sting. She thinks of the feel of the wooden blocks she used to cut.
Tom Sprot comes up, full of excitement. He has discovered a chest of drawers full of tangled thread and smaller chests of drawers all full of tangled thread and smaller still chests of drawers. He has got the text of an interview done by an art critic for A Woman’s Place, the text of which has just been delivered hot to the gallery by a messenger on a motorbike.
Debbie skims through it.
Sheba Brown lives in a council flat, surrounded by her own work, wall-hangings and cushions. She is in her forties, of part-Guyanese, part-Irish ancestry, and has had a hard life. Her work is full of feminist comments on the trivia of our daily life, on the boredom of the quotidian, but she has no sour reflections, no chip on her shoulder, she simply makes everything absurd and surprisingly beautiful with an excess of inventive wit. Some of her hangings resemble the work of Richard Dadd, with their intricate woven backgrounds, though they obviously owe something also to the luxurious innovations of Kaffe Fasset. But Sheba Brown, unlike Richard Dadd, is not mad or obsessed; she is richly sane and her conversation is good-humoured and funny.
She has brought up two sons, and gathered the materials for her work on a mixture of Social Security and her meagre earnings as a cleaner. She gets her materials from everywhere—skips, jumble sales, cast-offs, going through other people ‘s rubbish, clearing up after school fetes. She says she began on her ‘soft sculpture’ by accident really—she had an ‘urge to construct’ but had to make things that could be packed away into small spaces at night. Her two most prized possessions are a knitting-machine and a lockup room in the basement of her block of flats which she has by arrangement with the caretaker. Once I had the room, I could make boxlike things as well as squashy ones,’ she says, smiling with satisfaction.
She says she owes a great deal to one family for whom she has worked, an ‘artistic family’ who taught her about colours (not that she needed ‘teaching’—her instinct for new shocking effects and juxtapositions is staggering) and broadened her ideas of what a work of art might be …
Debbie goes home thoughtful. Mrs Brown has done her day’s work and left. Robin is fretful. He does not want spaghetti for supper, he is sick of pasta, he thinks they must have had pasta every night for a fortnight. Debbie considers him, as he sits twisting his fettucine with a fork, and thinks that on the whole it is probably safe to tell him nothing about Mrs Brown and her Aladdin’s Cave, since he never takes an interest in A Woman’s Place, she can hide that from him, and she can probably keep other criticism from him too, he doesn’t read much, it depresses him.
No sooner has she worked all this out than it is all ruined by Jamie, who rushes into the kitchen crying, come and see, come and see, Mrs Brown is on the telly. When neither of his parents moves he cries louder,
‘She’s got an exhibition of things like Muppets with that gallery-lady who came here, do come and look, Daddy, they’re bizarre.’
So Robin goes and looks. Sheba Brown looks down her long nose at him out of the screen and says,
‘Well, it all just comes to me in a kind of coloured rush, I just like putting things together, there’s so much in the world, isn’t there, and making things is a natural enough way of showing your excitement
The screen briefly displays the