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Chloe comes over. ‘Can I go now? I said I’d meet Amy in Primark.’
Charlie rolls his eyes. ‘Priorities! Don’t you want to look at Pat’s work first? You’re interested really, aren’t you? Your favourite subject?’
Chloe grimaces and twists round on her feet and I feel a lurch of guilt remembering how I pushed Gethin’s interest in Astrophysics.
‘Let her go,’ I say. ‘There’s no point in forcing it.’
Chloe cocks her head up at Charlie.
‘Go on then,’ he sighs. ‘Don’t forget to text Mum to say when you’ll be back.’
‘Will do, love you.’ Chloe all but skips to the entrance, blowing a kiss as she disappears.
Charlie shakes his head. ‘OK, that’s your scariest critic out of the way.’
Rehana joins us, smiling now. ‘I’m sorry Pat, if I upset you just now. It’s just, some of this stuff,’ she waves her hand towards Bedsheets. ‘It is not for me, but I’m really interested to see your work.’
I look from Charlie’s benevolent smile to Rehana’s intelligent interest and recognise the loyalty of my two favourite colleagues.
‘OK,’ I grimace. ‘Let’s do it.’
We walk round the white-boxed installation to the entrance. They pause to read the title label: Patricia Williams: Anything Goesmixed media installation. I feel a little leap in my stomach. Perhaps it will be OK.
I follow them in, trying to see the work through their eyes. I watch them take in the six-foot-wide Perspex screen across the middle; the life-sized dancing figures, outlined in thick black paint on the screen, infused with ultra-violet from the strip-light above. I feel a flutter of excitement. I actually made that.
‘Look,’ Rehana points. ‘Their heads are mobile phones.’
‘Facebook and Twitter icons for eyes.’ Charlie adds.
Rehana scans the splintered spirals of collage on the wall behind, visible through the screen, converging on the figures’ phone-heads and filling the outline of their bodies. She moves behind the screen to examine the fractured images of child sweatshops, war blasted ruins, lines of refugees, industrial decay, ravaged rainforest, battered women, collaged with ads for smart phones, make-up, clothes, food.
‘We have converted our T shirts to Fairtrade cotton,’ Rehana reads from the slogans in the collage mix. ‘Human Rights Act: What’s not to love?’
Charlie moves to examine the political posters from the eighties, framed in traditional gold stucco and hung at an angle on the white side walls, either side of the screen.
‘Hey, I remember that one.’ He points to Thatcher in a frame of newspaper headlines: ‘MY MESSAGE TO THE WOMEN OF OUR NATION: TOUGH’.
Rehana joins him to examine the framed poster of my Lock In piece: police faces squashed against the photo-montaged wire fence; dancing women slipping in and out like mocking faery spirits.
‘I made that after being at Greenham,’ I explain. ‘I’ve included it with the other posters to show that, for all our small victories, nothing fundamentally changed.’
‘Well, they closed the base at Greenham Common, didn’t they?’ Rehana asks.
‘Yes, but the military industrial complex hardly took a dent, did it?
I take a step back, trying to second guess what they make of it. I’m worried it’s too obvious, or that they won’t get it. Charlie stares at the Stop Strip Searches in Armagh poster as if it’s a work of art in a museum; Rehana squints at a slogan in the collage: Gay marriage: radical legislation for the twenty-first century. What does she think of gay marriage? Of all the things to worry about: it’s just another consumer product, that’s the point, isn’t it?
‘Bloody hell, Pat!’ Charlie’s grin fills his gaunt face. ‘Amazing!’
‘You like it?’
He nods emphatically. ‘No lack of meaning here: all the shit filtering through the phone-heads, the people dancing through the shit.’
‘I’m just trying to show my perception of the world, all its contradictions,’ I start, my hands slicing the air. ‘So, with the dancers, you see, however we may celebrate our so-called victories, we are tainted by association with the society we live in and the things we take for granted…?’ I break off, worried I sound too preachy.
Charlie nods. ‘And the framed posters. Genius. Like all that we fought for has been absorbed, neutralised.’
‘Commoditised,’ I interrupt, so pleased that he gets it. ‘As with Fair Trade Cotton and Gay Marriage…?’
