Thoughts
Memory Skeletons is a collection of works that explore which details of a memory are required for it to remain true each time it’s recalled.
My work investigates how recall affects the integrity of the memory, and I’m fascinated with the properties of materials often using their inherent qualities to reference an element within my work. I want to find the qualia of memory, that is the subjective and personal reading and emotions attached to an experience,
Whenever we think of a memory, we don’t recall it exactly the same each time, instead we bring to mind different elements or details which are pertinent to the retelling for that occasion, whether done consciously or subconsciously. I’m interested in trying to find the core set of details of an experience which are needed for the recalling of that memory to be of the same experience each time. I devised a process to interrogate the minds eye’s of subjects, in an attempt to identify the core details of a scenario. I call this set of details a Memory Skeleton. The Memory Skeleton of an experience can be fleshed out with extra details, but it will still feel like the same scenario. After identifying the core details I abstract them and use them to produce mixed media artworks.
The large Memory Skeletons have been influenced and informed by the associated smaller Satellite pieces; their creation informing the choices for the larger pieces as well as being works in their own right. These satellite works are like little snippets of the experience, rather like the fleeting flashes of a memory, when we know the feeling but don’t immediately remember the whole picture. They are the prompts that lead us to recall the whole experience.
For these works I use the Victorian Language of Flowers to create bouquets to convey a memory or sentiment. My first in the series, Cherish, was inspired by a bouquet I received on Valentines day. I started thinking how particular flowers, such as roses, were used as shortcuts to indicate emotions, and how these semiotics were instantly recognised. I remembered the language of flowers and looked more into how I could use them to tell a story or memory of an event. Shortly afterwards when my father passed, I explored my relationship with him and my grief, conveying these feelings through the selection of flowers.
Started out as a digital work for the New Platform Art group project. Our group was using the Cop 26 summit in Glasgow 2021 as a discussion point for a collaborative project. We each produced a work based on our thoughts and concerns about the global climate.
The subject matter, for me, is like an accordion - the actions of the individual affect the global environment whilst the global environment has an impact on the individual. I live very close to one of the most polluted roads in London. I used the readings of the nitrate levels obtained from the pollution monitoring station that’s located near my house as one of the layers in the work, the numbers becoming a ‘pattern’ and material rather than obvious and meaningful. To the residents the numbers are irrelevant, but their impact noticeable.
Reconstruction is a combination of wall-mounted and floor-standing works whose relationships compose a strictly non-representational and abstract account of my memory of Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St John, housed in a cathedral in Malta, and remembered from childhood. The pieces are each self-contained and explore texture and sensation in a diversity of materials, evoking fragments of experience, not always directly relevant to the painting. When these sections are assembled together they reflect the ambiguity of my own memory and examine how our pasts are reinventions and adaptations of personal histories; the piece allows for constant construction and reconstruction, facilitating a fluid retelling. The wall and floor pieces can be shown individually as well as together.