The memorabilia of madness
==========================

* Anne Marie Todkill

Vera Greenwood's installation *High Ground,* recently on view at the Ottawa Art Gallery, is a remarkable reconstruction - and deconstruction - of a family history disturbed by unacknowledged mental illness. The first section of the work chronicles the arrival of the artist's grandfather in Canada and her father's childhood in Alberta. Artifacts (real or purported) displayed in glass cases offer what first appears to be a benign excursion into prairie history. But the viewer soon finds evidence of a brutal past: the two-by-four that the artist's father, Alec Greenwood, saw his father flog a horse to death with when Alec was five; a gold tooth recovered from the ruins of a house that, at the age of six, he watched burn to the ground with all of its inhabitants inside; the gloves that his father wore when he tried to strangle Alec that same year. The question arises: to what extent did inheritance and traumatic events lay the ground for the illness that would later manifest itself in Alec? FIGURE 1

![Figure1](http://www.cmaj.ca/https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/161/8/1014/F1.medium.gif)

[Figure1](http://www.cmaj.ca/content/161/8/1014/F1)

Figure 1. Vera Greenwood *High Ground,* installation detail.

The second part of the installation stands in darkness. The viewer is obliged to inspect each item by flashlight in a pseudo-forensic exercise that begins with Alec Greenwood's military records. It is fascinating to read the sometimes conflicting reports, which note his lack of physical coordination, "dull mentality," "poor attitude," and occasional insubordination. One report describes him as "a surly, disgruntled individual" and declares that "Nothing is wrong with him from a psychiatric standpoint." If, in its purest intention, diagnosis is a form of knowing and not merely of labelling, Alec Greenwood was more obscure in his own lifetime than he is now, after his death. What is lamented is less his illness (which the artist believes to have been paranoid personality disorder) so much as his essential unknowability. FIGURE 2

![Figure2](http://www.cmaj.ca/https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/161/8/1014/F2.medium.gif)

[Figure2](http://www.cmaj.ca/content/161/8/1014/F2)

Figure 2. Vera Greenwood *High Ground,* installation detail.

One puzzles over the fact that this incompetent, uneducated man fathered six children and built largely with his own hands a house on "high ground" that he purchased for $100 on the outskirts of Calgary. The rooms were never finished past the drywall and two-by-fours, on which Alec recorded the names and telephone numbers of people he believed to be conspirators. The installation replicates the family home with an impressive inventory of domestic artifacts in gyprock rooms. From appliances to clothing, crockery, games, savings coupons and sewing patterns, these memorabilia of the fifties have a haunting effect, especially to a viewer of Greenwood's vintage. But the soul of the installation lies in the accompanying typewritten file cards that provide an account of the artist's growing realization that her father was odd. This realization expressed itself as a desire to be one of the kids from an adjacent, wealthy neighbourhood, as if the feature that distinguished her family from others was not its dysfunctionality but its lack of affluence. The youngest child, Vera appears to have had a special bond with her father; at the age of 15 she would sit for hours watching him play solitaire while he conducted half of an imaginary conversation. But the emotions she records include pity, resentment and remorse. At one point she writes:

Dad was a passive presence amongst us most of the time. His wife and six kids would buzz all around him and he'd stay calm, lost in his own world. He'd come straight home from work, eat, pace, talk to himself, play solitaire. ... We all craved peace at home and most of the time we got it. We were very good at gaging [sic] Dad's moods and we could walk on eggshells when necessary; we'd usually just clear out. My Mom took up bowling and bingo in a big way. We knew from experience what topics to avoid at all costs ... 

*High Ground* is a courageous work. In achieving a reconciliation with her memories, Vera Greenwood has the advantage of a deep sense of irony and an artist's awareness of beauty in all its unlikely forms. Reflecting on the unplastered stoneboard of her family home she is able to note: "After 30 years it was all discoloured, especially in the kitchen near the gas stove. It was quite a beautiful colour, actually, a golden brown."