As a British immigrant living in Spain I am fascinated by English household icons, the memories they evoke and what we choose to save our past. My mother left behind a collection of blue and white and red and white china. Little of this was I able to bring back to Spain but I was able to bring back her piles of worn-out tea towels and dusters. Using these I have been making replicas of her teacups and saucers and china tea pots. It’s a crazy but compelling method of making a mold around original items of china, tearing it apart and then sewing it all together again using pieces of my mother’s old Irish linen tea towels. The stitching echoes (albeit in a deliberately more haphazard and over-worked manner) the ancient Japanese and Chinese tradition of riveting or stapling together broken china. Of course I owe much to the surrealist artist Meret Oppenheimer and her famous fur teacup and saucer but I don’t know anyone who has been mad enough to make one out of an old tea towel. Perhaps appropriately the word ClOTH on the original tea towel has lost its H, leaving the word CLOT, a word used often by my mother to describe a foolish person: on occasion used to describe me! I often wonder what she would think about my cloth china. I think she would be most amused and intrigued that her tatty old tea towels had been put to such an unusual use, and that her whole way of life was being effectively celebrated in this way.