Scraps of emotion at the Foundling Hospital
Contained in the billet books of London’s Foundling Hospital is an extraordinary archive of emotion. The Hospital was founded in 1739 by the philanthropist Captain Thomas Coram for “exposed and deserted young children”. Those who passed through its doors had all traces of their former lives removed: they were given new names, new clothing, a new future. In the eighteenth century, the only remaining connection between the family who could no longer afford to care for their child and the infant they left at the Hospital was a simple scrap of cloth.
These thousands of intimate tokens – flower-stamped cotton perhaps, or hearts, birds and acorns printed on a cheap frock – would be roughly cut out from either the mother’s or the baby’s clothes. One piece was taken away by the mother, and the other preserved out of sight in the Hospital’s records, offering the hope that parent and child might some day be reunited. When the artist Jodie Carey began to research the collection of the Foundling Museum – built on the site of the former Hospital in Bloomsbury – she found these poignant everyday fragments. Each piece, its marks and patterns, are descriptions of loss. And in Carey’s series of installations at the Foundling Museum, the artist pays tribute to this history of absence and separation.