Performance Title: Sixteen to Sixty
Performer: Patricia Derrick
Date: Sunday 13th April 2008
Location: Wymondham, Norfolk – distance from Cambridge: approx. 60 miles
Time & Duration: 3 p.m. for one hour
Weather conditions: Rain, thunder and lightning
The past is a foreign country – to quote a writer whose name I cannot recall.
This year I celebrated my 60th birthday and the distance between me and my African girlhood grows ever greater. My attempts to recapture the past include using my greenhouse to grow tropical plants that were once so familiar to me: most notably, the Frangipani – a small tree with fragrant white flowers.
The Frangipani seeds I acquired germinated well but in the artificial environment of the greenhouse they have grown with a pronounced lean – as if reaching towards their warm, far-distant home. My performative act on this wet Sunday afternoon was to try uprighting my little trees by re-potting them and also sowing the seeds of African Marigolds which were the first ever flowers I grew as a child. They require careful temperature control in the greenhouse for some weeks before they can safely be planted outside.
Shutting myself in the greenhouse with the plants, safe from the elements and reality, I strip off my warm woollens. I yearn to be on that same tropical beach in the photograph, when I was sixteen, wearing the same bikini. I too am in an artificial environment, reaching towards an irretrievable past.
