A friend writes about the artist whose remarkable book about her husband dying of a brain tumour, The Iceberg, has won the Wellcome prize
The other day, I was looking for something on the internet when I found a picture of Marion Coutts from 1989, wearing her famous Poll Tax dress: A-line and sacklike, NO POLL TAX in huge felt letters stitched all down the front. If you’ve read her remarkable book, The Iceberg, which won the Wellcome prize this week, you’ll know how good Marion is on bodies, dresses, artworks, foodstuffs, “material, solid objects … the consolation of the real”. If you remember what happens at the end of it, you’ll see why this picture was a shock.
In December 2010, Tom Lubbock, Coutts’s husband, was lying in Trinity hospice in Clapham, speechless and paralysed, dying of a brain tumour. She wanted to make him a blanket as a Christmas present, with her name, his name and the name of Ev, their little son, sewn on in big woolly letters. When I saw it I thought it was brilliant, yes, and deeply familiar: I’d forgotten about the dress at this point, I just saw Marion and her making of stuff in general. “This is a big task, mad for the late hour but it seems natural. The spontaneity of it feels familiar and exciting, like how we used to be.”
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