Inspired by a near-death trauma in her 30s, writer Tanya Shadrick has been curating tangible reminders of people and places that are important to her, which she archives in old tobacco and sweet tins
Photos by Tanya Shadrick
Tanya, tell us about your Concentrates of Place.
It’s a practice I began on the 10th anniversary of my near-death from an arterial hemorrhage. I pledged myself to a rest-of-life creative response to that experience, and all the work I’ve made since (as a hospice scribe, a self-proclaimed ‘writer of the outside’ and now as an author) has this purpose: to find and share multi-sensory ways by which we can celebrate our most vivid and intimate moments of being.
What do they mean to you?
They mean the world to me, literally. In what I call my first life – before the hemorrhage – I was a very nervous and self-limiting person, rarely leaving the country or even my adopted hometown on the Sussex Downs. Now, my writing life connects me to people and places far beyond my old comfort zone, and so each tin is a heady reminder of that expansion. And they are just delicious things to open up for the colours, textures and smells they hold: heather, moss, sand, slate…
Do you give any away as gifts?
Yes, only as personal gifts, not commissions. During lockdown it was lovely to walk to nearby Rodmell by the River Ouse – the last stomping ground of Virginia Woolf – and fill a tin with pieces of chalk and flint for a visual artist making an illustrated journey of Woolf’s regular walk to her sister Vanessa Bell’s home at Charleston Farmhouse. As an afterthought, I added a bit of loose bark from the tree that reaches over Woolf’s writing shed.
We’re so used to taking a quick snap on our phones to capture a moment or place – what do you feel is lacking in this?
Spending long periods bed-bound because of the lasting damage from the hemorrhage left me with a passion for bringing all my senses to how I enjoy and record experience. My Concentrates allow me to touch over and over again a walnut shell from a tree in Switzerland or put my fingers into sand from my childhood beach, and share those textures with others. I’ve got photos too, but the tins mean more to me. I use a smartphone of course, but mainly to make one-minute sound recordings – another practice that tries to move beyond our modern over-reliance on the eye.
Do you have a favourite Concentrate?
My mentor is the sculptor David Nash, whose work returns after each exhibition to the Welsh chapel that has been his home and studio for the last 50 years. A chance event brought him and I into orbit, just as I began my second life as a writer, and I now get to stay among his huge carved pieces most summers, which is such a deep pleasure and privilege. And so the tin filled with slate and heather from there is a particular treasure.
Have you always been a collector?
In my memoir The Cure For Sleep, I describe how early childhood loss created in me a tendency to “prize routine and everyday objects more than people. As if by loving a person in pieces, through pieces, to pieces, I could suspend time, stop sorrow.” After the near-death, I began to find a public form for this lifelong instinct to curate, celebrate and commemorate. Something that began with a private hurt has now become a way I share healing perspectives with others.