Notes from sitters

We do not collect star ratings. What follows is what sitters have allowed us to print. Names are shortened where they asked.

Short notes

I arrived with a shoe box of letters I had not opened since my father died. The sitting did not rush the box. We read three letters in the first hour and left the rest for the second visit, which was the pace I could bear.

M.K. · Identity Journey Canvas · inner west Sydney

The applied identity review was sharper than I expected. I wanted a gentle family story. What I received was a clear account of how I still introduce myself as a visitor in a city I have lived in for nineteen years.

R. Adeyemi · Applied Identity Review

My sister and I had not sat in the same room without a parent since 2009. The family sitting did not make us agree about the year we left Penang. It did put both years on the same page, with the tickets we each still had.

L. and A. Tan · Family Identity Sitting

Rowan would not put my grandmother’s recipe book into the canvas as a charming detail. I was annoyed in the revision sitting. A week later I was glad: the book was the station, not the decoration, and the bound page now treats it that way.

S. Papadopoulos · Identity Journey Canvas

The opening sitting was enough. I did not commission a canvas. I left with seven stations written on a card and I have used that card when my son asks why we do not go back. I still think the room is a little formal for what is, in the end, talking.

J. O’Rourke · Opening Sitting

A longer account: the Broadmeadows badge

Helen sat for a canvas in autumn after her daughter asked why there were two surnames in the old albums. She brought a biscuit tin, a factory badge, and a marriage certificate that used the later name.

The first sitting stayed with the tin. Helen could name the year the plant closed and could not, at first, name the week she stopped wearing the badge. The second sitting used the certificate only to date the change; the analysis on the page is about the counter job that followed, where the old name still drew questions from people who had worked on the line.

The draft came back with a station Helen had not wanted: a sentence about being glad the daughter had never seen the factory. She asked for it to be cut, then asked for it to stay in a shorter form. The bound canvas uses the shorter form. Helen writes:

I would not show the canvas to the people I worked with. I would show it to my daughter, which was the point. The sitting was slower than I had patience for in week two. I am still glad we did not skip the tin.

A longer account: the name on the roll

An Applied Identity Review for a school teacher in the inner west began with a roll that still printed a married name two years after a deed poll. The sitting did not treat the roll as a clerical nuisance. It treated the public name as a field where identity was being spent without consent.

The written review lists the rooms in the school where the old name is still spoken (the staff kitchen, a parent from a former year, a trophy cabinet) and the rooms where the restored name holds. The sitter asked us not to name the school. They did allow this line:

I thought I was coming about paperwork. I left knowing which corridor still uses a name I have put down, and I can walk that corridor on purpose now.

If you want a sitting of your own, write with the years you care about.