Hush Don’t Tell: it’s a mother and son reunion

With her show, Hush Don’t Tell, fine artist Mary Husted shares some of the most intensely personal episodes of her life: the giving up for adoption of her newborn son, Luke, and their eventual reunion when he traced her as the result of her work being part of the New Hall Art Collection.

The final piece in the show, which opens today at Murray Edwards College as part of Open Cambridge, is an audio visual projection called Each and Every Year, made jointly by mother and son. Mary’s pencil drawings of Luke from childhood to the present are shown against a backdrop of falling snow, with audio visual effects and soundtrack composed by Luke.

The New Hall Art Collection – Europe’s largest collection of work by contemporary women artists – began acquiring Mary’s work in 1992, the year of its inception. A year later, her work was chosen for its first, and her second, solo show. The mother and son reunion came about only three years ago when Luke, searching for his mother’s name, came across Mary’s collages on the New Hall Art Collection website.

The artwork that Luke gazed at on the screen of his computer, with the growing realisation that he was looking at an expression of his mother’s feelings about him, is a collage called Dreams, Oracles, Icons. Based on a photograph of Mary taken by her father, it is a portrait of a teenage girl tenderly holding a bird in one hand. On the outer raised surface of the piece, a tiny child is held in space, alone and adrift.

For Luke, Dreams, Oracles, Icons carried a visual message from his natural mother. Not only did it help him to identify her, but it also encouraged him to make contact. He says he’s now thrilled to have been able to contribute to a piece of art that tells their story: “Using my technical knowledge to provide a new medium for Mary to work with, and adding some of my own creative ideas, has been very exciting.”

Throughout her career as a fine artist, Mary’s work has centred on a search for place and identity. Since the reunion with her son, she has dwelt increasingly on themes of memory, loss and retrieval. Of her latest show, Hush Don’t Tell, she says: “This exhibition is a story. I make no apologies for this.” What went untold for so long can now be told. She does this though collages built up by layering paint, paper and semi-transparent pencil drawings into shifting dimensions, incorporating words and images that float and fade, to create an overlapping of time past and time present.

Accompanying the exhibition is a statement written by Mary that takes the viewer back to the straight-laced suburban society of the early 1960s. Mary was 17 and studying at art school when she became pregnant. Bending to family pressures, she agreed to keep her pregnancy secret, give up her baby for adoption, and make a fresh start. “My pregnancy was something shameful and illegitimacy was a serious social stigma,” she says. “I was told to go away and live my life, and forget it.”

Luke was born in the long cold winter of 1963. In the ten days that Mary had with her baby, she made a few pencil drawings of him. “I had no camera and felt the need to capture something of him, something to keep hold of and perhaps something I could give him one day.” Handed over to adoptive parents, Luke acquired a new name and grew up to become a successful businessman who now has his own young family. Meanwhile Mary’s drawings lay at the bottom of a cardboard box, together with a bundle of letters from Luke’s father, a handsome Persian and her first great love.

Time passed. Mary married twice and had four further children, all dearly loved – but she never did she forget Luke, the confusion and disgrace of concealment and the deep sadness of that early loss. In the 1980s, once her children started to fly the nest, she trained as an artist in Cardiff. Working primarily in collage, she began building into her work hints of her experiences by using a process of “hiding and revealing”, playing with surfaces and dimensions, dreams and memories.

In 1992 New Hall launched its Women’s Art Collection and the College President Valerie Pearl wrote to a hundred female artists to ask for donations of their work. Seventy five responded, among them Mary Husted. Curator Ann Jones travelled to Mary’s house in Barry, South Wales, and with typical generosity Mary invited her to choose a piece of work. The artwork that Ann selected was Dreams, Oracles, Icons.

“When Ann told me that this was the art work she’d like to have in the New Hall Art Collection, my heart gave a lurch as it’s so acutely personal,” says Mary. “But then I thought, yes, it should go out into the world, because then there would be a tiny, tiny chance that Luke would see it and get in touch. That I would one day meet him was a wish so precious to me that I hardly dared even think about it.”

For 15 years Dreams, Oracles, Icons hung in New Hall Art Collection in Cambridge. Then one day in September 2007 Mary received an email in her junk box with the subject line ‘family tree’. She almost deleted it. The message was from Luke who had found his mother’s work online. A flurry of emails followed, they exchanged photographs and after a fortnight they met. Since then, Mary has drawn and drawn him “as if drawing was the only way to get to know the child I lost”.

Mary’s latest show comprises around 30 new pieces created specifically for it. In collaborating to produce an artwork together, she and her son are closing the circle and cementing the bond that held them in their few days together so many years ago, when Mary held her newborn baby in her arms in the knowledge that that this tiny being would soon fly from her life. “I still can’t quite believe what’s happened and what’s still happening - it’s a story that’s far bigger than me,” she says.

Hush Don’t Tell is part of Open Cambridge, a programme of talks, tours and more from 10 to 12 September, opencambridge.cam.ac.uk. The exhibition runs from 29 August to 25 September at the Temporary Exhibition Space, New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Huntingdon Road, Cambridge CB3 0DF, 3pm to 6pm only on 29 August and then daily, 10am to 6pm, admission free.