Early last year I had determined that knots were my area of interest and prophetically it became a year of anxiety and knots of various kinds. My thinking moved on, partly I suspect because of the materials I was using and this year I have been exploring memory. My work for CHAINreaction had its genesis in the tactility and scent of old table linens from a bygone era.
Ironically memory has been equally prophetic this year as I have recently decided to move house. This has meant working my way through my possessions, deciding what has to go and what can stay. I realise that often it is not the objects themselves that I am attached to but the memories they invoke. Things can lie dormant in a cupboard for years but my looking at them activates them, for me.
So much of our identity is wrapped up in memory and shared memories can validate histories, or cause argument when the memories differ. We become the sum of our memories unlike other species.
“Only humans understand themselves as an enduring self that has a past and a future, perhaps because only humans can use language in order to contemplate their past experiences and future actions. Other animals exist in an eternal present.” Yuval Noah Harari, from his book Homo Deus. Harari is discussing the use of language here but the value of a past is relevant to self.
In Nelson I spoke of the movie Blade Runner (made in 1982) with reference to identity. Harrison Ford is a Bladerunner in a future dystopian society (2019) where replicants (AI robots that appear human ) have been manufactured to serve humanity. They have got out of hand and are illegal on earth. Ford’s job is to identify and kill replicants. He is encouraged to test Rachel the secretary of the company that manufactures the replicants. There follows a harrowing moment when he confronts her with the truth that she is in fact a replicant. She had believed she was human….. she has memories, old photographs….. she is bewildered.
So much of our present relies on foundational memories of the past and objects can be points of reference. Like some gigantic web we weave about ourselves, and others, the threads of experience encase and validate us, we use our senses to trigger memories. I think of Louise Bourgeois with her giant Mama spiders. She saw them as diligent, hardworking and protective spinning their webs. I think we all spin webs that cocoon, entrap, and tangle our beliefs in our little histories. After all in this life, we only have this body as an identity and losing memory is synonymous with loss of self even if the body is still active.
I am exploring a variety of materials, however often I come back to a wax coating. Somehow this preservation ‘skin’ is becoming integral to the work. The whole house saga has put me behind but I’m now back in the workshop and trying to pull together and distil the various threads I’ve just discussed.
In Memory
