Black leather exuding discipline and strictness.

Chris Muirhead admitted that he loathed his wife’s now replaced black leather handbag and boots, which is fair enough, but what I found amusing was his reason for feeling so – that they made her look like a district nurse. I guess it was something with how one ends up carrying a large handbag. But still, it set my imagination in motion. Since Chris is also an artist, I felt I should engage with the material in an interesting way. I approached it by imagining this hypothetical district nurse (I never met Mrs Muirhead so my imaginings were purely based on the donated leather objects themselves), and then I tried to paint a portrait of her using the boots and bag as my material. Both boots and handbag had features I could retain, even though by necessity I had to scale down the figure of the nurse. I cut down and folded the bag around one of its handles, creating a smaller version of the same where some of the forms just became much more prominent. The toes of the boots also got to stay, to keep the shape and function, but I bent the boots around their toes so that they also came down in size.

Always on the run between different patients, but always so elegant.

The rest of the figure was then constructed from the leather I had saved from the boots and the bag, apart from the tights that came from the bags lining. I wanted to keep it simple, so I basically just stapled the leather on a number of plywood cut-outs that I then attached to a backing board. This is also the reason she never got a head, but also that I wanted to let her retain her mystery, and that I preferred to imagine her seen from behind, dashing past with confident steps on her way to the next patient.

A clever owner could still use the bag to hide something, maybe the key to a secret hideaway, or messages…

Object no. 18