The Studio Shelf — A New Weekly Series

Keeping Memories

Stories from the shelf at Studio Kre'at.

There is a shelf inside my studio that is growing slowly.

It is not filled with precious antiques or expensive collections. Instead, it holds ordinary things that have quietly carried a life ~ a doll, quilts, photographs, a prayer card, buttons.

Every week I will take one object down from the shelf.

I will sit with it.

I will listen to the memory it carries.

Together we will remember the people, places and moments that shaped an ordinary life, because I have come to believe that ordinary lives are sacred lives.

Welcome to Keeping Memories ~ a quiet corner of Studio Kre'at where nothing hurried is required.

"Art that remembers, honours, and carries forward."

Volume One: Shirley

There are some stories that begin long before we are old enough to remember them.

Mine begins with a blonde Horsman doll who crossed the sea from England in the loving hands of my great-aunt and uncle.

Before I could speak her name, she was already waiting for me.

I called her Shirley.

I have no idea where that name came from.

Perhaps children know things the grown up world do not. From that day onward she became my companion, my baby, my confidant, and the keeper of countless adventures.

This is Shirley’s story and perhaps, in some small way, it is mine too.

Some memories arrive quietly.

Not through grand family discoveries or old documents tucked into archives, but through a faded photograph and the face of a doll.

Shirley was a Horsman doll, about twenty inches tall, with long wavy blonde hair and blue eyes that gently opened and closed when she was laid down to sleep. My great-aunt and uncle, my grandfather’s sister and her husband, brought her home from England for me when I was a wee little girl aged one year old.

She arrived with beautiful lace trimmed dresses.

Shirley came everywhere with me.

She sat beside me for tea parties, slept beside my bed, listened to secrets, and became whoever I needed her to be that day. Sometimes she was my baby. Mostly she was simply my friend.

The adventures that belonged to one little girl were gently carried into another generation around lounge room floors, bedrooms, and bedtime conversations.

Looking back now, I realise it was never really about the doll.

Shirley, the doll is gone but the stories are not.

My studio is filling with quilts, family photographs, Irish cottage memories, scraps of fabric, and the quiet lives of the women who came before me.

Shirley now joins them, even in her absence. She reminds me that ordinary objects become sacred because of the life they witness.

There will be a shelf in Studio Kre’at for things like this. Not valuable things in the big worldly way.

This shelf is for remembering things. It is the keeper of memory.

And somewhere, I hope, another little Horsman doll is waiting to be found.

If she finds her way home again, she will still be called Shirley.

Because some names never really leave us.

🖊️