‘my little flicker’ is a text/art work that premiered at Plathfest in 2022.
‘my little flicker’ is a collaborative text/art work. The images here are photographs of drawings produced by Hesketh’s then two-year-old child in spring of 2022. Each evening at bath time, for a period of about three weeks, Hesketh’s daughter drew, unprompted, a series of shapes on the bathroom tiles. She would only use the red bath crayon. Each shape was drawn inside an individual tile.
The text that sits alongside the images was produced by taking the recorded dates of Hesketh’s menstrual cycle going back over 20 years and, using a number substitution system, replaces the numbers in those dates with the equivalent words from Sylvia Plath's poem 'Poppies in July'. The number 1 becomes ‘little’, the number 2 ‘poppies’, and so on. The piece evokes a mother-daughter connection. It also gestures at how marking cyclical time can perhaps be viewed as an innate female preoccupation. It draws on Rachel Cusk’s notion that “the basis of maternal time lies in repetition”, both before and after the birth of a child.
