Painting the women who made me

When I was little, and my Mum still tucked me into bed, I used to beg her to tell me stories of the ‘olden days’. Mum, a talented writer with a penchant for making any story feel magical, would laugh at the phrase, and tell me tales of the women who came before me.  

Mum spun stories about my Great-Great Granny Vickers, who swore off school and would sneak out the window during classes. Instead of learning Maths or English, Granny Vickers spent her youth riding her horse through the fields of Cambridge.  

With her words, Mum painted the acres of garden that my fiercely political Great-Grandma Rhoda made flourish despite her pragmatic, no-nonsense nature. Groves of maple and chestnut trees which would colour the air green when the sun shone through. Flowerbeds colouring the ground with red tulips, white roses, and blue irises – Rhoda’s favourite flower.  

That passion for gardening and nature was passed down to my Grandmother Janey, who would take me fairy hunting in her garden.  

It is my Great-Gran Mim who I used to beg for stories of the most. Mum would tell me about how she met my Great-Grandfather Jack – which I thought was the most romantic and devastating story I’d ever heard. She met Jack during a summer spent with her cousins in New Zealand. On her return to England, Jack followed her back by signing up for the Airforce. They were married only a few months before he died in a plane crash during World War II. Gran Mim was left pregnant with my Grandad. During the War, she drove an ambulance for injured soldiers while singlehandedly raising a child. After the war, Mim moved back to New Zealand, remarried, and raised three children.  

After Mum turned the lights off, and the only light in my room was the glow-in-the-dark stars shining from the ceiling, I would pretend to talk to these women. I told them about my day, whispered secrets into the air, and asked them questions about their lives. I lay there, desperately wishing they’d answer back from the darkness. 

I was in Year 13 when I came across Gran Mim’s diary hidden away in a dust-covered box. I drew a finger through the dust coating the cracked brown cover, and through the yellowing pages housing Mim’s dancing handwriting.  

It had been years since I’d begged my mum for the stories. I’d taken down the glow-in-the-dark stars, and I didn’t talk to anyone in the dark anymore. Stuck in my final year of NCEA and it’s predicted toll on my mental health, I’d never felt more uninspired in my life. Yet, it was Mim’s beautiful scrawl that flicked a light on.  

It felt like she was talking to me.  

I was seeing bits and pieces of my female ancestors everywhere. They were in their intricately painted China plates which now hang on Janey’s wall. In the irises that grow in Mum’s garden. Looking over the old collection of Jane Austin books resting on my shelf. They joined in at the family dinners around Rhoda’s old kitchen table. It was perhaps one of the loneliest times of my life, but as I learnt more about them, the objects they owned, and the lives they led, I felt some sort of companionship.  

To my art teacher’s delight, I began to explore this in my paintings.  

Painting and storytelling has always come hand in hand for me. Every painting I do needs to have meaning, or it’s meaningless. So, little by little, I collected their stories, their letters, their favourite flowers, the plates they’ve handed down through generations, and I painted them back to life.  

The first painting I did was of Rhoda’s blue onion-patterned plates set on a table ready for dinner. When Mum first saw it, she thought it was a photograph.  

“My god, Jess!” she exclaimed, “you’ve just captured my childhood in a nutshell!” 

The next painting I did was of a tea set that Granny Vickers made while she was in finishing school in Austria. This painting made my Great-Aunt Ginny burst into tears.  

My early paintings were simple, domestic scenes of table settings and tea sets. They felt golden, innocent, and blissful – and for a while, I felt that way too.  

But as we all know, life isn’t perfect. Mental health ebbs and flows. And with it comes grief, challenges, and heartbreak.  

So, naturally I smashed the plates (not in real life – Mum would kill me). 

Plates and teapots were falling from the sky and shattering into pieces. The lily of the valley flowers that were in Mim’s wedding bouquet wilted amongst a graveyard of broken China. The purple wisteria from Janey’s porch hung from the top of paintings, representing a lost love. The moth orchids from Rhoda’s flower beds symbolised death.  

My first painting of smashed plates was a visual of one of Gran Mim’s diary entries after losing Jack to the War. Mim wrote, “Jack has been killed, and my heart aches and aches but refuses to break.” No matter how many times I read that sentence, it still makes me cry. It makes me want to smash a thousand plates.  

As I uncovered more of Gran Mim’s story, her strength in the face of pain, I felt like she was pushing me to do the same. Slowly, life felt golden again. This is when I introduced a poignant symbol in my art – Kintsugi. This is a Japanese method of repairing broken pottery using lacquer mixed with gold. The technique highlights the beauty in imperfection and the strength in healing. Just as broken plates can be mended into something more beautiful, so too can our hearts. 

The flowers which grew in these paintings were the hopeful light of the calendula found in Grandmother Janey’s Garden. The petunia and its symbol of healing found in Mum’s flowerbeds. And the patient bonsai tree which sits in my bedroom next to a photo of Gran Mim.  

The stories of my Great-Great Grandmothers, Great Grandmothers, Grandmothers, and Mum are woven into my DNA. The silent strength, grit, and determination that survived through the hardest of times is shown in my paintings. My art stands as visual echoes of my ancestors’ lives, the objects and hearts they touched, the plates they passed around the table to family, and the imprint they’ve left behind on me.  

To most people, I describe my paintings as realism intertwining with magic. With its trees growing out of books, bees flying around smashed teapots, and gold lacquer rivers flowing throughout. But to me, these paintings are what I longed for as a child, lying in bed beneath the soft glow of my stars, wishing for a reply from the women who made me.