Goodbye to Granny - Chloë Gunn 1930-2024

Chloë Gunn, Granny, 1936-2024

Many of you may have noticed that I have been quieter than usual over the last month. Last month, I lost somebody incredibly important to me. This is my grandmother, Chloë Gunn, the mother and now ancestor of my father’s line, and in many ways the central matriarch of my family.

She has been a big part of my life. Living in London, I saw her regularly. Over Christmas this year, I moved in with her for 3 weeks because I wanted to spend more time with her and to help take care of her. We spent Christmas and New Year’s together and hosted all sorts of guests together. I had a feeling that it was important to spend as much time with her this year as possible - and to be around her as much as I could as she became weaker and approached the threshold between Life and Death.

She was a force of nature. She was a Scottish Granny. An incredible woman, icon, and friend to so many. In her funeral service last week, 160 people showed up with a week’s notice, which I think speaks for itself - the thing I learned from Chloë and the thing she embodied deeply was kindness and generosity. Over the decades of her life, she hosted so many people from around the world in her house. At any given time she would have 4 or 5 different people living with her, lodgers, young people coming to London doing internships, cousins from Mexico, visitors from far away lands. She loved travelling and she loved different cultures - and she had a deep love of Mexico from when she spent time there with my grandfather as a diplomat.

I grew up staying with her regularly as a young girl, and her house and life was always bustling. She loved the presence of people and the creativity and stories they bring. Her house was full of paintings, nicknacks, gifts from different cultures and art - and it’s really thanks to her that today and through my life I have been an artist.

When I was little, I would go and stay with her and her husband, Bill, for days at a time. My memories of those times was waking up early and running into their bedroom and crawling under the duvet to sit between them in bed in the early hours. Granny would cook me what she called ‘Scottish porridge’ made with water and not milk. She was luxurious in her love of friends, flavours and artwork, but austere in money and food. Her husband Bill, who came after my grandfather, encouraged her to let go of the sense of post war scarcity and live a little. It was epitomised in how he’d make me another breakfast after the porridge - of bacon and orange juice.

Granny would encourage me to make art and would regularly take me to her art studio. She was an artist, a sculptor, and so I grew up with clay and paper and paints and her encouragement to make things, without any expectation of what.

One of the earliest things I remember making was a sculpture of a mouse on a mat, all painted in colourful stripes. It was random, and fun, and made me delighted and it delighted me how much joy it brought my Granny. It’s with her that I first started drawing jungles and rainforests, sometimes obsessively, and I like to think it’s the beginning of where my love of biology, ecology and a connection to all Life became visible.

We regularly went to art galleries and to see exhibitions. It would be like our own little “Artists date” as Julia Cameron talks about, meeting during my later years, age 10, 11, 12, teenage years into young adulthood. We would meet somewhere like the Tate, or Royal Academy where she studied, or National Portrait Gallery, and we would dedicate an afternoon to seeing art. I would take my sketchbook and draw and allow myself to be inspired, and many times I would imagine that one day, I too would study at art school and be part of the ancestral flow of Life and creativity.

In school, I took Art for GCSE and A level, and for my first GCSE project, I focused on my great grandfather, Chloë’s father, James Gunn, who my dad is named after. He was a portrait painter, who went to Paris when he was young and grew up with all the other contemporary European artists alive in that time, spending time around people like Rodin and learning how to make painting a (badly paid) career. Over the 1920s, he made his money by painting elites like politicians, royalty and cultural icons. He went on to paint the Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 in one of his best known paintings.

I’m not sure how I came to focus on him for my GCSE project but it was a transformational journey in connecting to my ancestor. My Granny painstakingly helped me found photographs, old sketch books, and letters of his, and in the end I finished the project by making a big etching of a tree signed with his name, and for me it was a project that signified the power of ancestors speaking through us like roots of a tree.

In these final years, she has been one of my biggest fans and supporters. I would visit her and tell her about the latest conference I’d spoken at, and she would listen wide eyed and demand to watch the entire YouTube video recording, and then sending it to my relatives and her community. She would say she didn’t completely understand what I was talking about but she said she felt it’s finally time for my artist roots to come through. She was bamboozled by the idea of me starting my own company and working for myself as a woman, she was so impressed and in some ways I could tell it was so far from what was possible when she was my age that it felt strange and foreign. But she said if I ever needed somewhere to stay I had a bed at her house.

The grief I have felt over the last 3 weeks has been overwhelming. I was with her in her final days, sitting with her as she struggled to breathe and came to terms with her death. I always loved her silver hair that since I was a child “looked like smoke”, while my hair “looked like spaghetti” (a mystery I couldn’t get my head around), and in her final days I stroked her beautiful hair and held her hand and allowed the sorrow and grief to flow through me and consume me.

She died surrounded by my father, my aunt, and my cousin Sofia holding her hand. I arrived an hour later and sat with her body, holding her hand and kissing her cool cheeks and I feel changed by that experience, of sitting with my ancestor and sitting with Death.

Words cannot describe how much I feel that who I am is thanks to the influence of this woman in my life. She was creative, generous, strong, adventurous, spontaneous, and put people and culture at the heart of her life.

May she know how loved she was. May she be resting in peace. May her memory and presence continue to guide me in my life. Rest in peace my dear Granny xxx