Hush Don’t Tell: Artist Mary Husted on the adoption of her baby

Time: 7.00 pm Venue: The Muse, Glamorgan Street, Brecon Artist Mary Husted on the adoption, when a teenager, of her baby, their reunion after 44 years and how this has influenced her work. Cost: �5 (friends/members �2) At the age of seventeen, in the early 1960s, art student Mary Husted was pressured into giving away for adoption her ten-day old baby. At this time illegitimacy could still blight the life of a child and she had been sent away, hidden from sight, until the baby was born. With just a few drawings of him she remarried twice and had four other children. Left, too, with memories and imaginings the earlier event deeply affected her and, perhaps inevitably, emerged in her art. Forty-four years later, though, a remarkable sequence of events led to a reunion with her son. The Friends of Brecon and District Mind have invited Mary Husted, who lives to talk about her experience, the complex web of related emotions and how her artwork has reflected it. Mary moved to Wales in 1979 and, between 1986 and 1990, studied for a degree in fine art at South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education. Her work concerns image, memory and landscape, box works being illusionistic devices portraying the ambiguity of nature and the location of things. Much of her work, though, exploring family, loss, identity, things veiled, hidden and revealed, has, unsurprisingly, been influenced by earlier events in her life. Becoming reunited with her adopted son in 2007 gave rise to a series of works entitled Hush Don”t Tell and an exhibition at Murray Edwards (formerly New Hall) College, Cambridge. Indeed, as will be explained, the College and its art collection played a key role in bringing them back together. Mary has long kept notebooks, including sketches, and this practice has evolved into developed artworks. Since 2011 a project, toured internationally and entitled Open Books: artists and the Chinese folding book, has involved artists filling blank folding books. Mary”s current work, mostly derived from nature in collage, drawing and watercolour, derives from a Chinese-influenced reverence for accidental marks. These contribute to books, framed works and wall-mounted boxes. A poster for the event can be found here For further information please phone 01874 611529 or email info@breconmind.org.uk