The artist Bea Haines is explaining why she has turned the ashes of her great-uncle into paint to create a work of art. It was inspired by the death of her grandmother 10 years earlier. “When my grandmother died of cancer, we were left with her house,” she says. “Going round her home, there were traces of her everywhere. They were quite comforting, actually, like little pieces of her left behind … it was almost like she still existed, but she had just gone out somewhere. From that moment, I became very interested in traces, especially human traces, and what they say about people, because they offer a kind of narrative.”
The first thing she decided to do was to draw a section of her grandmother’s carpet, in the place where she used to sit each day to do her makeup and brush her hair. “The carpet had been worn away in this very small section where her feet used to sit. And I had this feeling that even though she was gone, she had left a physical imprint on the family and all of our lives. I thought: that’s something really poignant.”
From there it was just a small step to create an artwork using her grandmother’s gallstones. “All I had left of my grandmother’s physical body at that point were her gallstones. And although the gallstones themselves were actually a menace to her, and a waste product, they were an amalgamation of all the minerals and cholesterol that had built up inside her. I felt they were still a part of her body. They became like a relic, really, to me.”
We are sitting in Haines’s studio at the Griffin gallery in east London, where she has spent two months as an artist-in-residence, working with chemists in the laboratory of innovation and development next door. Haines, 30, is a former Royal College of Art student and comes from a family of artists – her parents met and worked at Madame Tussauds – so it felt natural for her to create an artwork as a way of remembering her grandmother.
“My grandmother, my mother’s mother, always encouraged me in my art career and anything I wanted to do. I associated her with the happiest times in my life: summer holidays, Easter and Christmas. She would cook me lamb chops and take me on walks in the countryside, play with me, nurture me. I have this general feeling of being loved when I visited her. I wanted to show that in my artwork … but in a different way.”
For Haines, the gallstones that others perceived as grotesque waste were the human equivalent of pearls. She examined them under a microscope and made detailed prints of the magnified, crater-like images she saw. It was her way, she says, of coping with her grandmother’s death.
“I’m lucky because the job that I do as an artist is a really good way of dealing with things. It was therapeutic. I remembered being with her more. It made me feel closer to her … but also, more far apart in another way. It hammered home the fact that she isn’t here any more. Yes, I’ve made these artworks; artworks she would have been so proud of. But she’s not here. It was kind of bittersweet, really.”
The prints ensured that her grandmother – or at least, her grandmother’s body – embarked on a new adventure after death. “People burn and bury their bodies because there’s this notion of ‘rest in peace’. But why rest in peace when you can have some kind of life after you’ve died?”
Her decision to turn her great-uncle Jack’s ashes into paint came after seeing how people reacted to the prints of her grandmother’s gallstones. “They would look at them and say: ‘That’s beautiful.’ Then they would read the information and realise they had been looking at a gallstone, and they would recoil a little bit. And that was actually what I wanted. It meant I had challenged their perceptions.”
She decided to create an artwork that would provoke similar discussions about death. “It’s something every family has to deal with: a death in the family. But some people prefer not to talk about it or are nervous about bringing it up with relatives. Death is a taboo subject. I think if we were more open about it as a society we might be able to deal with it a bit better.”
Jack was the brother of her paternal grandmother. “I only have very faint memories of him, so this project opened my eyes to his character. It made me reconnect with my father’s side of the family in a new way.”
She met with relatives to look at old photographs and talk about him. “Jack was a sailor and they told me all these cool and funny anecdotes about him, like the time he sailed his boat over to America and ended up going to Woodstock.”
The stories brought her great-uncle to life, she says. “There’s a connection between memories and the physical form. With my grandmother, I ended up reflecting on our relationship. But with my great-uncle, it was more nostalgic, hearing my relatives’ stories about him. It made me understand him more, and his character.”
She believes an original piece of artwork is a far better way to commemorate the lives of her relatives than, say, a mass-manufactured gravestone. “In my family, art is seen as the most important thing. And although you can write something on a gravestone [to personalise it], I think there’s a kind of richness you get from looking at an original piece of artwork. That richness can sometimes be lost in text, especially if just a little phrase that you can fit on a gravestone is meant to describe somebody’s whole personality. In a visual artwork, there’s more there, in a way.”
She acknowledges that some people will find the idea of developing paint pigments from human ashes disrespectful, and was careful to use animal ashes in the lab when she was working out how to create the paint. “I wanted no waste of the human ash, so I did only the final artwork with Jack’s ashes. There was a bit of a gamble with that because the ashes could have reacted in a slightly different way.” And actually, she says, they did. “The colour with human ashes was much richer, this beautiful dark-black colour, while the animal ashes were brown. I don’t know why.”
The brown paintings she made with her test paints cover her studio walls. I look at some animal ash under the microscope on her desk and see lots of tiny bone fragments. Did she ever, at any point, feel a sense of revulsion? “No,” she shakes her head emphatically. “I have quite a strong stomach.”
The main people she focused on getting permission from were Jack’s wife and his son (her father’s cousin), although her grandparents and her father were also aware of what she wanted to do. “They were all OK with it. After they got over the initial shock, they gave me a yes straightaway. They understood my reasons for doing it.”
There were no legal restraints on what she could do with the ashes she was given. “Once the family have the ashes, it’s up to them to do what they want with them. There are restraints in terms of scattering ashes, but in the environment I’m in at the Griffin gallery, working in a lab, it’s quite well controlled.”
To make her final artwork, she collected water from the lake where Jack had learned to sail. She used this as a wash before adding the ash watercolour to produce the artwork. “There’s a great deal of my time and effort and love put into these projects. To me, what I’m doing is actually more respectful than just scattering ashes or throwing gallstones away as biological waste. This is my way of respecting the dead.”
• Bea Haines will exhibit at In Residence at the Griffin gallery from 27 July to 25 August, griffingallery.co.uk
