Scientica Building
Curated by Emma Robinson
My work Residue, 2006
How do you begin to enunciate a memory, it is as it is. Clouded or articulated by the experience brought to it. It is the ability of the mind or of an individual, organism or computer program to retain learned information and or knowledge of past events and experiences and to retrieve that information when a trigger is applied. Any stimulus that sets off an action, process, or series of events can be classified as a trigger. As the information is retrieved through a filter, the subconscious, a computer program or personal experience can all affect the way that memory is retrieved.
A child walking along a beach is drawn to an object they see, but what makes them see that object from amongst the thousands of other objects that lay at their feet. It is the discarded memories that inform this work, the scraps the linger in ones subconscious, that allows one to see, to stop and look or to retrieve a newly found treasure and to either discard or consign that treasure into a new life and give that treasure an altered future.
Residue is a series that explores natural growth, decay and renewal; one which records memory as tangible signifiers of a past trauma by impregnating its host with imprints of time and spent energy. This work concerns itself with the process of disintegration, the residue from that disintegration and the ritual inscription that is woven upon the surface.