Alison : This object has floated around in my life all my life. I’ve always loved grey silvery blue, and I only started really looking at it about 6 months ago, and I realised it had a pair of extremely nice moths in the design, and because I’m rather a moth freak at the moment, I kind of got interested.
The object itself has very few clues except that it comes from Old Street in Liverpool, which means that is from quite a far back generation. [framed in Old Street Liverpool]. It’s probably a Japanese piece of needlework, and may well have come back from any one of these world tour things people did. So it could have been Hannah [grandmother], or my grandfather.
It came from the old house in Wales. It was just one of those incidental floating around objects, and I always like it because it reminds me of my grandmother. One of these objects that you subliminally absorb, you don’t really think about it. I think it’s very beautiful…kind of ghostly so it reminds me of ancestors.
[of Hannah / grandmother] I loved her very much but she died when I was eight and I was trying to find a photograph of her to show you this morning. It was an enchanting old photo of my grandmother holding me as a baby, and I was a very smart little baby. She was a woman with high aesthetic sensibilities. I know that her father was a passionate collector of all sorts of things. We have one piece of evidence, of a living room in a house in Clapham before she was married, and that living room was absolutely stuffed, I’m afraid I have to tell you. Stuffed with pictures and objects, you know there wasn’t a spare inch on the mantlepiece.
The Royal Collection 