Remembered Imaginary Scenes of Manifestness
An Inquiry of the Memories Stored in Liminal Repositories.
Attempt to Process Personally Relevant Information in the Guise of an Encyclopedic Collection of Artefacts and Images whose Categorical Boundaries are yet to be Defined.
A series of images, a visual account of memories of imagined times and places, a collection and classification of artefacts and objects assembled as evidence to convey the peculiar sense of atmosphere arising from the aforementioned imagined times and places.
Establishing a visual account (from memory) and incorporating an assumed (and) suggestive bias:
Using my own Eyewitness identification, (a witness who has actually seen an event).
In an attempt to pin down, and create a visual record of, an event (its time, the place in which it occurred and the action), I depend on memory and source as many supporting facts as possible – but as a remembered event, I have experienced discrepancies in the eyewitnesses accounts of others. When these accounts challenge my own memory, I am aware of two distinct effects on me:
1) My own account is reliable, the other person’s unreliable. Their testimony is dismissed.
2) The resulting paradigm shift (of incorporating new evidence/accounting for a more informed point-of-view), makes it impossible to hold on to the original memory. The new information is included. The memory re-jigged.
By incorporating information learned after the event, or imagined at the time, into a memory, I can elaborate a theme and supply evidence, to support ‘a distillation of Truth’. To use information from knowledge garnered after an event, I can reconstruct a scene. By noting the catalyst of a memory, the ‘repository’ that informs the remembered scene is the starting point for the work. As the event/scene is recalled over and over, I may begin to drop details from earlier versions (of the memory).
Artefacts
To re-create the imagined items that relate to the memories stored. E.g. Mrs Bolton’s Crime Thriller Fiction: I was told that the mysterious wife of the Man who owned our farm had written a novel. I imagined her, and still store that memory of the picture I formed in my mind. She had black wispy hair, wore rings on her fingers, and wrote at a leather topped desk in a slightly Gothic house amongst Bragenham Woods. I ‘saw’ her book in my mind’s eye: hardback, dust-jacket, with an illustrated image of a thorny thicket hiding a gun filling the front cover. There is no evidence at all that her novel looked in any way like my imagined version. I have a compulsion to produce the book. And to make sense of why this particular memory is so plainly and clearly ‘remembered’.
Imagined Memories
In order to separate significant (visual) memories of actual events and scenes, from memories of imagined events and scenes; I have become accustomed to associating the latter (imagined versions) with a childhood alter-ego.
I had a strong sense of being able to slip into (the) character of Frieda Frowhawk. Frieda was always going to be the driving force to remove myself from a rural, working-class background, (with the limited expectations that went with that), to seek out other, broader and more creative opportunities.
Referring to the beliefs and ideas I have about myself: these beliefs are used to guide and organise information processing, especially when the information appears significant. Self-schemas are important to my overall self-concept.
Having developed a schema about myself, I am aware of a strong tendency for the schema to be maintained by a bias in what I attend to, a bias in what I remember, and a bias in what I am prepared to accept as true about myself. My self-schema has become self-perpetuating. The self-schema is stored in long-term memory and both facilitates and biases the processing of personally relevant information. The narratives that weave their way through the images and the schematic employ themes of: All that rises, all that falls. The bitterness of Love – Hate. Injustice. Social Stigma. I use the mongrel as a metaphor for being working class. My moral compass is not drawn from religion, but from instinctive and memetic codes of practice. I struggle with notions of conformity. I am fascinated by the Asch Experiments. I have a strong sense of wandering from The Beaten Track. I am propelled by Quest stories.
A self-initiated schema gives me a diagrammatical device for placing ideas in rows and columns – order out of my own flitting chaos. If the constant compulsion to create pictures is an attempt to move toward visual ‘enlightenment’, or some sort of understanding – presumably the purpose for my continual practice – I must present all images as equal; that the subtlest or briefest look in one image; a momentary or fleeting peripheral glance in the next; a studied and patient stare, should attempt, or should at least be as capable of, communicating some kind of ‘truth’.
My practice is naturally, intuitively and instinctively ‘series’ led. I can know this by recognising the pattern of my design work process; by recognising how each aesthetic decision and visual discovery, in each project, leads into and influences the next. The series allows a flow of ideas; that the journey from one image to the next allows the brain to concoct a narrative. That even the flitting nature of my cognitive process can relate (with hindsight)… that momentary journey the eye takes in the space between seeing one image and the next – that beginning or first stage of a process. The liminal state of lying between otherwise defined areas without belonging to either of them. The threshold of discovery.
Subject Matter:
Memories: Eyewitness, Witness and Unreliable Witness.
Define ‘significant’ events from memory.
Traumatic events: Believing oneself to have been abandoned, the rejection by family, establishes an umbilical connection with Place.
Joyful events: Exploring the vicinity of Place. The effect of Nature and The Elements on the imagination. Exploring the Wonder of Discovery. Freedom of Imagination.
Collecting Evidence
Create from memory the items that appear in specific memories.
Collect and classify items of importance to be displayed in cabinets. Tabletop cabinets. I have a strong sense that artefacts should lay horizontally, pored over from above. Submitting to close examination. I have an equally strong sense that upright, vertical displays feel cocky to me. That the displayed items deny close inspection.
Maps. Public records. History. Geography. Cultural and/or iconic items. I have a desire to produce the Maps (in some cases already existing as drawings), that show what I imagine/imagined were Over the Hill and Faraway and Around the Bend. I have a compulsion to create the evidence that I depended upon (in my imagination) whilst the necessity to Flee (over the hills and faraway) was strongest, in my past.
Items of Evidence
Ordnance survey maps (doctored to include what was imagined to be ‘over the hills…’).
The novel that was imagined to have been written by the unseen lady who lived in the farmhouse at the End of The Lane.
The Fiction (The Bigger Picture), typeset and designed to portray selected Passages in the style of its Time and Place.
Key Books that Inspired.
Tobacco tin with ‘treasures’.
Visual Record of The Time and Place of a Significant Moment
Paintings: each scene goes through a process of discovery. Each painting starts with an intention to record a significant moment (relating to a strong feeling or realisation). It may be that a realisation dawned whilst making a walk through a spinney, thus ‘the spinney’ contains a strong impression of the perceived ‘realisation’. The Spinney becomes the repository of memory. And if the realisation was Frieda’s, it may well have incorporated a fictional (imagined) exploration of feelings, an ‘acting out’ of a scene. This imagined event is thus incorporated into the sense of the Spinney.
Ideas:
The subject matter of the work often focuses on the social, class and personal labyrinths we exist in; conventions which we are conditioned to inhabit. I am specifically interested in the judgemental, (and sometimes hysterical) response, by communities and families, to an individual’s private and domestic tragedy, trauma or shame. I want to describe and interpret the emotional effect of social taboos, (often media-led, but propagated by us all), high-lighting the social disadvantage for its perceived, and tarnished victims, scape-goats or Other.
The exposure of personal vulnerability, sniffed out by an alert populace hungry to bully and victimise, highlight the ‘Dunning-Kruger Effect’. I create images which draw on the absurdity and emotional cost of being in a state of liminality. The paintings and digital prints highlight specific moments based on my memory, or visualisation of situations, sometimes held in little more than an expression, which have been constructed into staged settings in which the events are symbolised.
The installation contains selected narratives; narratives that arise from accumulated memories/items of importance. Narratives that emerge from placing one picture alongside another, in sequences of seven.
Seven: a grid sequence to contain, in rhythms and succession, an order. To build tension, (the central piece in the fourth position) distributing the weight in a perfect balance, producing equilibrium and harmony.
Senses: Hearing, Sight, Smell, Taste, Touch, Feeling, Thought
Rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Violet
Virtues: Chastity, Temperance, Charity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness, Humility
Stellar Objects in the Solar System: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn
Ages of Man: Infancy, Childhood, Lover, Soldier, Justice, Old age, Dementia
Sins: Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride
Orifices (human head): Ear, Eye, Nostril, Mouth, Nostril, Eye, Ear
The Seven Samurai, (The Magnificent Seven)
Days of the Week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday
Wonders: Great Pyramid of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, Colossus of Rhodes, Lighthouse of Alexandria
When rolling two standard six-sided dice, Seven is the number most likely to occur. It is the sum of any two opposite sides on a standard six-sided die.
The Liberal Arts: Literature, Languages, Philosophy, History, Mathematics, Psychology, Science.
Quotes
“We do not see what we sense. We see what we think we sense. Our consciousness is presented with an interpretation, not the raw data. Long after presentation, an unconscious information processing has discarded information, so that we see a simulation, a hypothesis, an interpretation; and we are not free to choose” (Norretranders, 1999).