In 2008 I visited Carlow, Eire, where my father, Thomas James Codd was born. We had had a difficult relationship, right up until about a year before his death in 2007. In Eire, over one weekend, I met eleven of my cousins, none of whom I had seen since I was four years old. Five of us went together to visit our parents ‘home house’, Newtownhill, a farmhouse, now derelict. In what was the parlour, our grandmothers piano still stood, but only just. I asked them if I could keep some of the fretwork and they helped gather a few sections. My grandmother, Mary Frances Codd (née James), died before I was born. She had brought her piano to the house when she married Peter James Codd in 1912. They had nine children.
These works was made after ‘from my grandmothers piano’ using prints of the same motif – the decorative fretwork and imagining the chords and notes the piano would have played and the songs sung around it.