Studio Notes April - Found Wooden Pegs
Ancestry Yarns Project - Jenny Davis 2026
Found Pegs...
I just can't throw away some things. What do you do with your mum's wooden pegs that have spent many seasons weathering and rusting on the hills hoist? - The usual thing would be to toss them away.
For me, I just loved them and spent more time than necessary just looking and turning them over in my hands. I felt a deep connection to them and something in them l didn't want to lose. Maybe because Mum had gone now, they felt like a small, physical link back to her. To those ordinary days that don’t seem like much at the time, but stay with you.
I can still see it — spending washing days together when l was a very small child. Mum at the clothes line, moving steadily, peg after peg. Me nearby sitting by the big wicker basket, passing her the clean, wet clothes, one piece at a time. Nothing remarkable, just being there together.
Because the current pegs had been on her clothes line a long time now, it took me a bit of time to pry them off the wire. The rusted metal connector came away leaving the wooden peg part. After contemplating them awhile l then left them on the concrete path out the back, meaning to come back to them later. I forgot.
A few days passed and I’d washed the path down with bleach in the meantime. When I remembered the pegs l went back and they had changed. The wood had taken on a kind of surface — a patina with soft shifts of colour that made them feel older and altered, like they’d carried something through that time. I couldn't leave it there...
I loved the look of them so l gathered up some of Mum’s hankies, laid them out with the pegs, and worked with the same elements bleach, rain, time. I also added steel wool. I left them outside for days, letting whatever was going to happen, happen.
What came back were cloths marked, stained, faded and softened. The colours drawn out and reworked by weather and exposure.
It still surprises me how something so small like a handful of old wooden pegs, can open into a body of work that keeps unfolding. Five years on, it’s still expanding, and finding its way.
Winter Dye - 2021. The old Hills hoist. …Rosebud Victoria 2021. A little video linking to the my ongoing “Ancestry Yarns “ project.