Laid to Rest

Outro

Angelica Frankle was a bright and vivacious young woman with many friends and followers, both online and in life. Born in Bath to a Vicar father and school teacher mother she considered both herself and her childhood far too plain to talk about. What is known is that she spent much of it with her nose in books and having “done well” at school went on to study English Literature at the London School of Economics. It is here she truly blossomed both academically and socially, her popularity amongst the smart young “arty types” never again waning.

A notoriously vibrant guest at dinner parties, she put her popularity down to the “curious collection of rather quaint and very queer characters” she would tell tales about. She was regularly heard to state that “You have carry a bagful of colourful to hide your dull behind”.

Yet in a twist she would highly approve of, it is only after her death by accidental hanging caused by a spider bite that her obsession with stranger’s lives has come to light. Amongst her possessions has been found an unfinished manuscript entitled ‘Laid to Rest - The Artful Obituary’ in which Frankle chronicles the fascinating lives and untimely deaths of numerous strangers.

It has subsequently been discovered that she was often an uninvited guest at funerals and had been known to interview others who had attended those she missed or were long past. The result is a quirky tome filled with the beautiful, bizarre and on occasion even bawdy collection of lives that make up Frankle’s life work.

Frankle will be cremated at a private ceremony in her hometown of Bath. ‘Laid to Rest - The Artful Obituary’ is due to be published by Webbers in the New Year.

About Laid to Rest

PollyWhistle artist Jane Millum makes “weirdly beautiful” little people and their stories flutter around her as she works. In trying to capture these, she creates lives and histories that are never quite real yet never quite unreal either.

With an eternal fascination and joyful love of actual people and their captivating tales, Jane believes each of us is a patchwork of stories, all quite real yet somehow unreal too.

"Too often we see only a snapshot, one patch or perhaps a few if we are lucky and it is all too easy to “neglect to consider” how the person stood in front of you is made up of a whole, big life. Sometimes it is only during occasions such as a funeral, that we learn more about someone’s patchwork than we ever did when they were alive."   

Mixing her own family folklore with imagined stories and snippets of news, Jane creates a nearly finished body of flippant and whimsical work and asks us to consider the fleetingness of life, death and what stories make us who we think we are.