We lived as conceptual artists. It’s what we were. If anyone wanted to know who we were, they had only to look. On special occasions, my family cut their clothes from paintings. Mum wore Botticelli. My sister wore Ophelia’s drowning dress, and Dad was the king some woman in a medieval painting swept around. I wore a smock from a haystack. Kids called me Yoko Weirdo.
My mother invited the kids to my birthday party. She shook hands with other parents from behind a canvas. We cut cake to throw at billboards. I blew out a candle and wished we could have normal parties. I wanted to wear Nike or Topshop like everyone else. But when the guests left and it was just us, we were happy. Never bored, we spent winter evenings catching the moon in a bucket a hundred times.
School was something else. The teacher gave my art homework an F. My canvas was blank with a small hole in the centre. I brought it home and Mum hung it over the window. We sat in front of it like a TV, watching the sun make the white yellow then pink, then a star fit through the hole. Mum said it was the best painting she’d ever seen. She attached the hair from my brush to her wall and added the tally of my sister’s freckles to the chart. Every summer vacation speckled on my sister’s face was counted like commemorative coins of hot days.
Sometimes we got notices from the Residents’ Association about the canvas in the yard with the leftovers of our meals on. Kids pushed me in the dirt and told me to count every grain. I’d go home angry, ready to lecture my family on the advantages of being boring. But there was my sister carrying a bag of peas under her arm, leaving one wherever she went. From the window I saw little green dots everywhere. Birds spread their wings everywhere she’d been. There was too much to see to stay angry. I looked at a cloud and asked it to gather vapours of how I felt.
Then things changed. Mum gave Dad a Valentine’s of skin she had shed in the past year. He flew a photo of her up to the sky and let go of the strings. There was nothing conceptual about the woman he left us for. She owned a paper shop. It was nowhere near as exciting as it sounds. It wasn’t a shop built of paper which the wind moved to where it was needed. It just sold stationery and magazines. Dad used to go in there with a scalpel, cutting ads out of magazines to replace them with instructions for origami butterflies. He was always an artist, but his talent was a sad burden. His biggest project had never been realised. He had dreamed of living in a house that was a giant sledge. When the city denied his building application he had started to send all his mail with pictures of his face on instead of a stamp. Black ink had etched his brow with worry lines. Only this could show him how he really felt. When that wasn’t enough, he gave up the life and moved on to the new project of living with the most ordinary woman in the world.
Art continued without him; it was all we knew. Mum was an idea machine, picking up the slack for them both. In his absence, she made a list of everything that needed to be done in the house, then went to bed, as if writing it down would make every chore do itself while she slept. The next stage of the project was to stay in bed until we came looking. When she got up she hung the sheets from the bed round the room like a tent, still unwashed. She looked out at the tree Dad had planted and wept tiny stones. Next, she started working on learning how she really smelled. She didn’t wash or change her clothes. Her skin was a project growing each day like thin tissue. Art was everywhere all the time.
Mum took a photo of the woman in the paper shop and made it into a canvas. We threw cookies at it before bed. Then, she reprinted the photo, cut it into sections and sent pieces of it to everyone she knew. The paper-shop woman received her own mouth in the post. The police came to our house. The word ‘harassment’ punched Mum in the chest. She tried to explain how she just wanted to give people something to carry with them all day, show them parts of themselves they didn’t understand. The police looked around the house and saw the canvas of Dad’s mistress covered in chocolate and crumbs. Child Protection came and typed reports about the dirty sheets and the peas all over the floor. They promised to return.
Mum had to stop her art until my sister and I were eighteen, or we’d be placed in a less artistic home. Our neighbours threw stuff over the fence. Someone sprayed ‘LEAVE’ on our canvas of Western waste.
‘Why won’t they leave us alone?’ Mum said.
She wished she could make her body a canvas clothed only by whatever people passing her drew on it, but she loved us too much to try. She cleaned the house and cut her hair. Piece by piece, my sister and I carried Mum’s art to the basement. Mum couldn’t show anyone how she felt without it. She bought a tracksuit and wore it. Me and my sister got winter coats.
It was only then I understood what any of our art had ever done. My mother dropped me at school like everyone else, dressed in nylon, a sandwich in my bag instead of a slice of the moon. And all I could think about was finding a stone, the same size and shape as me, ground down into fine powder. I wanted to give it to everyone every time I was called to crack a smile I didn’t mean.