GRACE HELMER

This here is a ceramic chicken made by my blind great-grandmother, Sybil. It’s wobbly and white and blue, and a little more on the abstract side of a representation of a chicken. You can hold it in one hand. Often I have to tell people what it’s meant to be, but I like that Sybil made it by relying on touch. When shaping it, she dug her nails in to add texture, and the blue glaze settled into those marks. Its charm is in the wobbliness and evidence that it was made by a human hand. Since living in London, I’ve generally been in quite small flats. There’s never much space for a big tree at Christmastime, so we have to overcompensate with lots of fairy lights and ornaments. I keep this chicken among other knick-knacks all year round, then when it’s closer to Christmas, I arrange an area of ornaments around a little tree, always giving it a prominent place. My great-grandmother died a couple of years ago. It feels good to have something physical she made as a reminder of her. This isn’t the first chicken Sybil made, though. She originally built one in a ceramics class, and when we saw it she had several requests from the family to make more – I was gifted this one the following Christmas. It reminds me of visiting her at her home for the blind, and always being offered a glass of red wine at 10 in the morning.