About the work

I make piles. My four year old destroys them. Blocks, sandcastles, folded laundry. I make. He destroys.

PILES is a diary of parenting through a pandemic, a series of images of found domestic objects formed into piles. For 7 days I made a daily pile inspired by my environment and the pressures and limitations around me. Then my husband, Chris Jones, and I photographed it.

Using domestic objects, snatched moments of time and ingenuity to keep it hidden from a destructive toddler, the piles offer a glimpse into family life on lockdown, the every day mundane, the howling rages, the crashing failures & towering triumphs of getting by. Autobiographical, risky, joyful, wry, they explore being a mother (to 2 children) and an artist in these unprecedented times.

PILE #1 / THINGS THAT ARE WHERE THEY SHOULDN’T BE

‘Things’ are in a kind of constant migration in our house. A great pacific gyre of objects, circling the boundaries and gathering pace towards the centre. A dusty sock here. A misplaced marble there. A box full of Duplo thrown to the four winds. I facilitate their perpetual motion until they snag, lodge in a crevice, worm their way under a cushion and come to rest. I dig for them, uproot them, dust them off, send them on their way.

Here, instead of returning the ‘things' to their rightful homes, I gathered them in another place they shouldn’t be. The oven.

It also meant I had to clean the oven.

PILE #2 / THRONE

I’m going to be straight with you here. My son is delightful. A charmer. A bundle of bountiful energy with a wicked sense of humour.

He is also a bit of an idiot.

This particular pile has its origins pre-lockdown and has been dismantled daily by aforementioned son since approximately last November, during very long, drawn out, oft traumatic, never unsurprising, trips to the bathroom.

PILE #3 / ALL THE THINGS THAT HAVE BROKEN SINCE LOCKDOWN BEGAN

Dining Chair (disintegrated)

Kitchen Bin (pedal fallen off)

Paper Lightshade (large hole punched in underside during Ryan Heffington live Instagram dance class)

Bucket (cracked, handle broken off, still in use. See “Shower”)

Floral Cushion (seam burst open following general toddler misuse)

Sylvanian Family Slide (stood on by barefoot child)

Dishwasher (literally just gave up. A mood)

Child’s Wellington Boot (sole worn through as a result of daily government approved exercise)

Balloon animal (gradual, inevitable demise)

Shower (stopped working on a half-soaped husband, hasn’t worked since. Bucket showers for foreseeable. See “Bucket”)

PILE #4 / YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU

I have to still my breathing
Cage the tigers
Smooth down their arched backs
SHUT UP still ringing in my ears.
Huh.
This is hard.
I think of what the neighbours must have heard
Her screaming clear as a bell
YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.

I don’t understand.

This is new.
This is my battleground
My field hospital
My holding cell
My wildflower field.

So I go to the sunny square
Let it warm my back
and balance

PILE #5 / SAINSBURY’S CLICK AND COLLECT

These tins make me feel guilty.
These tins make me feel safe.
These tins reassure me.
These tins keep me awake at night.
These tins make a good den.
These tins make a good* dinner.

*enough

PILE #6 / NOT TODAY, THANKS

Today I don’t want to be the grown up.
I want to hibernate, to be swaddled
Cradled
Weighted down into the thick pile.
I throw the windows open to the warm pounding rain,
The first since it all began,
And it smells of earth
Of deep, badgered burrows
Musky wet fur huddled close
Beneath the understory.
Today I don’t want to be the grown up.

PILE #7 / JUNE. THE THINGS WE LEAVE BEHIND

1 gravy spoon
4 giant pairs of tweezers
Recipes, various, handwritten
3 purses, one brown, one black, one red, where she saved holiday money for each of us
A sheet of passport photos, one missing
4 necklaces
1 signed photo of a boxer no-one remembers
1 hammer, kept beside the bed since Grampa died, ‘for protection’

I think my Nan would have been good at lockdown. She had a little cubby hole upstairs that we called her war store, and we would always tease her about the 12 packets of cornflakes, the tins and tins and tins of corned beef, the job lots of toilet paper. An endless supply of Tic Tacs that she would press into your hands as you left. I always rattled home from Wales.

When my Nan died, me, my mum and my sister all went up the road together to start sorting through what she had left behind. We drank sherry from dusty, cut-glass glasses because we didn’t know how else to begin. We looked for, and failed to find, the special greeny blue tea cosy that we always used to put on Nanna’s head, which made her laugh and swear. ‘You girls should take something to remember her by’. I found that I couldn’t. Weeks later while Mum was doing the final clear out I asked her to put together a box of things that were the most ‘Nan’ things she could find.

3 hairnets, hanging on the bedstead where she left them
Multiple cleaning products, unopened, because she couldn’t say no to the Kleeneze lady
2 pieces of tinsel that had been forgotten from Christmas
1 bag of Woolworths Pick & Mix from circa 1990
1 silk scarf
1 diary full of addresses
1 photograph of Grampa Ray
30 unopened packets of Tic Tacs

BOY MEETS PILE

About the artist

Katie Villa is a theatre maker, director, performer and mother. Her most recent project, The Birth Project, explores birth and motherhood through an autobiographical one woman show called WILD (part riot, part wake, part cabaret) and a participatory textile arts project called STITCH. Katie lives in Exeter with her husband and two children.

Katie Villa is the copyright holder of all words and images in this online exhibition. No reproduction of any of these words or images may be made without the permission of the copyright holder.