3 weeks & 6 days since I left for University. A month of change and adjusting but I'm starting to love living here, London is just alive, unlike anywhere at home. My project for my first term is surrounding identity. I'm exploring the theory by John Locke: our identity can be known through memory, that we can remember when we were young to present is proof of our identities. I'm looking at disproving and exploring the boundaries of this idea, themes of memory loss and memory-related illness, just because someone can't remember the past does not mean they are not the same person.
Project for first term at CSM
For me, memory has a direct effect on my identity, memories are events in my life compartmentalised, sectioned off into pockets filled with songs, smells and images. I think a lot about summer; time passed by meeting Lucy, Ellie and Flora almost every day, those memories are still so bright in my mind. I see them as a collective, of songs on playlists, of the clothes we'd wear, places and views we walked to, of salty hair and the scent of vanilla car freshener. I wonder what it would be like to not remember those times, to have them stripped away.
Text from Lucy
I believe regardless of keeping memories or loss, humans never lose the feeling of connection. Time fades all memory, but conection to others can always be felt.
Digital collage printed and re-collaged. This is made from photographs and text from all stages of my life to date, postering the images to create a sense of ambiguity in their nostalgia. The darkened parts of this could be interpreted as memory gaps, the black sections being things I've forgotten or memories lost over time, undocumented moments, not thought about unless subconsciously reminded.
I have begun exploring these ideas through my first rotation, making weave samples, again using black yarn to represent gaps in memory, alternating and colour changes to reflect the flux and change of life.
Research
Worldview
London, UK: Bookworks, 1999
224 pp., 21 x 15 cm., softcover
Edition of 1500
Tracey Emin's work has always interested me, the way she connects events in her life to tactile realities is a way of working that interests me. Her use of unusual materials that reflect a memory or event, for her autobiographical show 'My Major Retrospective', she included a packet of cigarettes her uncle was holding when he died in a car crash. The cigarettes become a metaphor for death, a link between an object and a life. Her work 'May Dodge, My Nan' uses objects relating to her grandmother. Objects as artwork, of recalling memory and reminders of the past. I relate to this in that I have always kept shoeboxes of 'memorabilia', train tickets, photos, shells from the beach and other seemingly mundane items, they remind me of where I was at that exact moment in my life. I would like to explore the tactile and memory triggers other than just images, such as smell, taste and touch,, much like Emin's work, using the physical to recall the mental- memories.
Tracey Emin
May Dodge, My Nan 1963–93
Mark Tennant's work has always interested me, the use of broad paint strokes allows his paintings to have a familiarity, these feel like pictures of myself and friends, there is a movement to his work like lived in memories. There is a livliness and youthful feel to his work here and a intimacy of moments shared between loved ones.
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