Aninka: A handful of memories
Without too many words, I’d love to evoke the image of my aunt and godmother Aninka Harms today. Aunt, jewellery designer, artist, baroque violist, mother, wife, creative soul. Ten years ago, an accident ripped her from this world, and she remains frozen in time, forever the 49-year-old she was then, forever never aging.
I looked back to some early photographs, trying to find images that capture the way in which she influenced me. While I would certainly have become a creative soul with or without her, I’m sure that she encouraged me in my creative unfoldment and even influenced me significantly on my jewellery path. This here is by no means a complete picture; on the contrary, it’s a very scewed one, just a scattering of memories for the occasion.
Aninka was such a complex and multifaceted person, like one of those new artsy cut gemstones: asymetrical, glittering, beguiling, beautiful, caught in mid-dance, yet with unknowable depths and hidden facets too.
This photograph above must have captured one of our very first meetings. It’s a whole story: Me keeling over, having sat, unsteadily, just a second before, wedged in a corner of our horrible brown corderoy couch. Then the milky stain, my crocheted slippers, her keen interest, neck outstretched. Here, she is not even thirty, just starting out her career as a free-lance jewellery designer in Salzburg.
Here we are, on my very first visit to Europe at 18 months. It was summer, some time before my brother was born, when I basked in the world’s attention. Aninka is all curls and movement and crinkly laughter.
Above, another summer visit to Europe, a bit later, when I was in second grade. Now, Aninka and her then-husband Hans had moved to Munich. The sisters - my mother and Aninka - saw each other seldomly, their lives on separate continents. A visit was all the more intense then, after many months if not years of not seeing each other. Here we all are - my brother, my cousin, Aninka and myself - crammed into her bed with morning coffee and cocoa in hand-made cups. It’s an impressive array of different hairdoes, with my brother’s being the most normal.
On that same visit, Aninka gave me my first oil paints, and apparently I am unstoppable here, way past my bedtime, painting in my nightgown covered in an old over-sized t-shirt of hers for protection. This was in her flat in Munich in Baaderstraße; I still remember the high ceilings, the long passageway, the wooden floors treacherous with splinters.
Here, above, is another thousand-word-photograph: The abundant floral arangement from my grandmother’s garden, Aninka painting with watercolours, apparently critical of her own work; my brother and me trying to paint as well, my face a mixture of admiration and envy, serious, with that high fringe so long before it became fashionable. My brother is holding his paintbrush in the special pen grip he had developed for himself during that time, which his kindergarden teachers eventually drummed out of him.
Here, just a scattering of memories, snapshots, frozen in time. While Aninka and I certainly had our disagreements and painful moments later on, she did inspire a sense of excitement and awe around art and jewellery and all things beautiful in me. Tonight, quite grateful, I raise a glass to her, my very own fairy godmother.