Our main aims in creating Reach-Me-Down are to reflect upon our past female generations and what has been passed down to us via lineage from our mothers’ sides. As women who have been brought up by strong mothers and grandmothers, we are aware of the characteristics and skills that have been directly passed down to us by them. In looking at the long-lost photographs of female relatives we have never known - our great and great great grandmothers, great aunts and so on - we feel a sense of disconnection with who they were as individuals, yet an awareness that we are the women we are today because of the role they played in the female generational chain. 

We are greatly inspired by the knowledge that as women we once existed within our mothers who were fetuses inside their mothers. In her book 'When the Drummers Were Women', Redmond describes the Russian doll-like effect that occurs as 4 month old female fetuses contain all the reproductive eggs they will have for their whole lifetime, thereby meaning we once existed at a cellular level within both our mothers and our grandmothers. We have existed within our grandmothers as they navigated the highs and lows of pregnancy, and within our mothers for their whole lives up until our births. In this way we feel connected to these women who came before us in a deep, organic, primal way, yet our relationships are also shaped by the changing reality of what it means to be a woman within society and our family structures. 

To describe in detail how the piece will be experienced would take away the magic for visitors, but we can explain that Reach-Me-Down will take the form of a woodland. Visitors may enter this space and experience a physical manifestation of these feelings of ours. To view a to-scale model of the structure please see the image gallery. Sound and projection will be used to fill the space, as well as an hourly performance. After each performance visitors are left to view what we have left behind; in this way the piece will be continually growing and developing, becoming more and more rich as time passes.