Pineapples Past and Pending…
An old friend still reminds me of the day we met, when I turned up in our communal kitchen on the first day of term in halls in 1994 Aberdeen and unpacked my kitchen “essentials”, a pineapple and a bottle of vodka, while our flatmates arranged their teabags and Tupperware. I was already performing the adult life I’d imagined for myself: pure Joan Collins, kaftaned and drunk, with a complete rejection of anything that hinted at drudgery.
That tendency hasn’t entirely left me. As a creative (or maybe just as me), my imagination has a habit of running away with itself, mostly constructing versions of events that reality has no chance of matching.
Ten years ago my imagination was off to the races. Having sat through a fair number of other people’s weddings and baby showers without my own moment, I was intent on making my 40th birthday a BIG DEAL, and decided to throw a Pineapple Party.
Pineapples have always thrilled me. Bonkers-looking things that taste amazing and promise some kind of transport to distant lands. They are Ab Fab, a proposal that life can be sequins and singapore slings, rather than sinks and spreadsheets if you choose it to be. People asked if they had to dress as a pineapple, and I said no - the dress code was more expansive than that, it was an ethos, a way of being (I’m laughing)….
Shaking my pineapples in 2016
The party itself became a kind of maximalist fever dream: techno and tropicana, a sweaty, messy, riotous, chemical-fuelled, pineapple-juggling 24-hour stretch that ran into Sunday evening. The last days of Rome had arrived via the Caribbean to a cold, dark Brighton seafront in March 2016. I haven’t dared get into that state again since.
Turning 50 in Paris earlier this month, I’d imagined a similar sort of cinematic milestone, a mild sense of triumph, perhaps a dazzling Patsy-in-Paris moment on the Pont Neuf - but in truth I felt slightly detached from it all, as if watching the whole thing from a distance. At this new age I feel a bit flattened; even this flag-flier of fabulousness hasn’t entirely escaped the sobering realities of midlife.
No one reaches 50 without encountering some degree of grief and loss, which can’t help but seep into the cracks without fully announcing itself. I feel it. There’s part of me that worries I’ve become pretty boring. I’m self-conscious that my Substack posts are drifting into memoir, and that my past is without doubt more interesting than my present.
I love being in bed by 9.30, and the only thing I’m double-dropping these days is a Nightol. My husband’s enthusiastic Sudoku habit triggers me in oddly extreme ways. To me it’s a low-level memento mori, gently smashing my mortality back in my face every time he innocently picks up his book of numbers.
My outfit says otherwise but I was feeling kind of muted…
No one reaches 50 without encountering some degree of grief and loss, which can’t help but seep into the cracks without fully announcing itself. I feel it. There’s part of me that worries I’ve become pretty boring. I’m self-conscious that my Substack posts are drifting into memoir, and that my past is without doubt more interesting than my present.
I love being in bed by 9.30, and the only thing I’m double-dropping these days is a Nightol. My husband’s enthusiastic Sudoku habit triggers me in oddly extreme ways. To me it’s a low-level memento mori, gently smashing my mortality back in my face every time he innocently picks up his book of numbers.
Somewhat less existentially, even I have had to accept that buying Tupperware is actually a reasonable idea, somewhere to put my anaemic, butchered chunks of pineapple for the studio ;)
The version of me who threw that party - the appetite for it, the energy - doesn’t feel as readily available now. I think (and hope) the energy hasn’t disappeared; it’s just relocated. There’s been a changing of the guard. The risk in my life now lives with me in the studio.
At this scale, the Pissed Fall Over drawings are a full body experience.
Lately I’ve been thinking about life as a kind of collage. Different emotional states sitting side by side without resolving - anticipation, disappointment, joy, heaviness. You tear things up, rearrange them, try to make some kind of composition from the fragments. It doesn’t always make sense, but somehow it still holds.
I feel an urgent need to make work that has some sort of instability about it at the moment. Raw edges, odd textures, an uneven, shaky, searching line. This week I covered an entire wall in purple paper and made some new Pissed Fall Over drawings at scale, drawing with my whole arm and body. The figures feel like they’re bursting out of the paper. I made them while listening to dance music and it felt completely thrilling.
My 2016 self feels like a fragment from a different life but also like source material. It’s still recognisably me. Just another piece in the composition.
Maybe that’s what this moment is: not a clean break into a new decade, but a rearranging of what’s already there. For all of us, the answers are close at home, already embedded in the fragments - in the work, in the patterns, in the versions of ourselves that keep reappearing.
In June, when the sun’s out, I’m planning Pineapple Party The Sequel. Not to recreate it, but to bring the same stuff to a different moment and see what happens ten years on. I feel like turning up the dial on 50 with the instinct to make something deliciously absurd out of whatever pieces happen to be in play - but with an earlier start time..
Rechannelling my inner Joan Collins, Joan Rivers - whoever the fuck’s left in there - let’s be ‘aving you !