ROSITA KINGSTON: RECLAIMED BAGGAGE

In late 2017 I called an end to the relationship I’d been in for almost 30 years. Along with the photo albums and other stuff left over from a life together, I had a suitcase, a white suitcase, in which I put all the cards we had made and given to each other over the years. The white suitcase made two further house moves with me. I opened it on occasion to try to decide its fate. I asked myself why I was holding on to the cards and letters. I didn’t want to retain unnecessary stuff.  But the creativity the suitcase contained wouldn’t let me destroy it.  

He too was an artist.  We made all the cards, (if we did buy the odd one, we altered it in some way). The collection started with the first card he gave me, on Valentine’s Day 1989, a collage which opened out accordion style.  We later had a frame made for it & it hung in our homes.  It measures five foot five, the same length as me. 

I stumbled blindly away from that relationship. It was a very confusing and scary time. What I had believed to be real and true had steadily been deconstructed. It felt as if not only had the rug been pulled from under me but that the solid floor beneath had been ripped up too. I couldn’t quite absorb the reality that was dawning on me, the truth I was slowly waking up to.

One day I opened the white suitcase and looked through the cards.  I saw what I hadn’t been able to see before. The cards showed me, in glowing technicolour, the truth of the basis of that relationship. Sex.  

The cards he made for me are a visual representation of how he viewed me. He exhibited his ‘love’ for me in a very creative way but came to treat me as a sexual commodity. Painful though it was to see the reality, the truth was there, and it had been there from the start.

I was love bombed by creativity, is how I’d put it. The overwhelming level of focus on my body and casting of me as a sexual being, evolved gradually into a controlling and ultimately destructive situation. The cards showed me how I often responded in kind, sometimes representing myself sexually in my own artwork. This is difficult to see and to accept, but that was the ‘love’ that was offered, and I reciprocated. When we met, at art school, I was 21.  He was 36.

Exhibiting this piece has become part of my personal process of recovery from the trauma of coercive control.

The title Reclaimed Baggage speaks to my wish to reclaim the self that I lost in that relationship, to reintegrate the parts of me I abandoned, to stand in my own life and reality and take my power back.

INSTA: ROSITA KINGSTON