A Handbag?!

In 2013 I was given my grandmother’s handbag. 

It summoned her to me, opening a cache of memories of childhood visits to her dusty flat in Barcelona. As a child I never questioned why my family was spit between England and Spain, and I grew up with a second home blissfully located on the beaches, streets and squares of Barcelona. 

I lost contact with my Spanish roots when my grandparents came to live with us in Birmingham, back in 1975, shortly before the death of the dictator - General Francisco Franco. I had lived my Spanish idyl in the last decade of the Franco regime with a strange atmosphere - which I now know was infused with an unspoken traumatic memory of the Spanish Civil War, and my father’s rupture from family and homeland. 

My encounter with the handbag was almost overwhelming. It seemed to embody my grandmother’s presence which at first was a joyful reunion, but the shadow of the Spanish conflict soon caught up with me as I uncovered a painful family history. 

My father suffered with a serious clinical depression for most of his adult life - a condition managed with pills and electric shock treatments. He was never offered a talking therapy and this was another unspoken history (of mental illness ) but the anxiety he lived with was evident. I believe that children receive and inherit hidden trauma and often blame themselves for their parents’ unhappiness. 

I loved my dad, and although I didn’t understand his struggle I wanted to make things better. Looking back I was probably drawn to art therapy by a need to heal my family history and the way it had played out for all of us. I felt that the not talking was a kind of prison. 

I trained as an art therapist in Sheffield in 1986 - 1987, and developed a tentative painting practice through the experiential group work sessions on offer. This early training set me on my way, and forms the backbone of my current professional practice. I now work as an artist and mentor to other artists, I also run community group work sessions. I no longer work as a therapist, strictly speaking, though in a broad sense my art therapy training informs everything I do - even the research for my projects. 

I mainly use objects as my inspiration for the many branches of my work, but inheriting my grandmother’s handbag seemed to open a portal to the past. 

Between 1975 - 2013, it had taken up residence in my mother’s wardrobe high up on a shelf, and was used to store old currencies and cancelled passports. So much had happened in my life - too much to detail here - while the handbag waited for me. Or so it now seems. 

The accompanying poem came to me during a series of broken nights in which I dreamt vividly of reconnecting with my past. I felt my grandmother was guiding me, almost speaking to me though the handbag. 

This prompted me to create my overarching, Barcelona in a Bag, project which is ongoing. Through it I seek to create a body of work which responds to the Spanish Civil War, and digital iterations of my work can now be found at Tate Britain, BBC Radio 4 and the Bodliean Library, among others.

Barcelona in a Bag

Sitting on mother’s shelf

housing the euros and the francs

and the cancelled passports

it sat emitting messages.

My time was then but it is also now.

Come, claim your histories, your map!

Too heavy then for grandma’s arm

bought with vigour by your hands, now frail

Unknowing how weighty it would be.

A real handbag! you thought. 

But it smarted in her hand

and finally the bag came to me.

Now abuzz with interference, (a large radio-player)

a boom-box with a heartbeat

the handling so right

nestling under my arm

My smooth-haired dachshund of a bag.

The longed for remembering’s yap

that summons thirteen years of summer

Now is the time to draw on her.

(What innards!) And her pale lining unfurls 

a recipe for cinnamon sand. 

It runs through your fingers

the sweet smell lingers

it’s time for cinnamon sand!

It’s a flan of a bag.

My crema Catalana to your creme brûlée.

On a maritime stroll her buckle winks and flashes

morse code.

I am the baton, I am the beat

and the fuzz of time is nothing to me.

Sonia Boué studied Art History at Sussex University, and qualified as an Art Therapist at Sheffield University. Sonia is a multiform artist who works with themes of exile and displacement. Recent work includes the BBC Radio 4 programme The Art of Now: Return to Catalonia, which focused on inherited traumatic memory. In 2016 Sonia discovered she was autistic and her new project is the Arts Council funded, Museum for Object Research, which includes a professional development initiative for autistic project leadership.