This fickle thing that makes us

Memory is a fickle beast, and yet so much of who we are is based on it. We tend to feel that we define our present self on our recollection of what made us, whereas it might be more accurate to say that it is our present self that defines what we regard as memory worthy. You only have to look at deeply imbedded sibling rivalry, even of the light hearted variety, to see that people who lived remarkably similar lives can have strikingly different memories about shared events. Arguments can stem as much from a defence of those memories, as from any actual slight or hurt - no one likes being told their memory is wrong, when that memory has been a foundation stone of who they are. The stories we tell ourselves are the fuel that fires success, revenge, attack and justification on both an intimate and national level - nothing is as powerful as a collective memory, or as fallible.

But memory is not a passive companion, and neither is it wholly submissive to our current agenda. As the brain uses sleep time as a grand library re-stocking, our subconscious diligently packing away each day’s memories rather like a haphazard librarian with very much their own agenda, sleep is often where we are confronted by the things we either have forgotten or attempted to reshape Luckily most of this is a jumble of bizarre imagery and sensation we ride through in our dreams, like a happy-go-lucky super market dash of the ego and the id, but there are moments when something surfaces which pulls us up short. Smells are great at this - a scent you’ve not encountered for years can suddenly send you back decades to when the world and you was a very different thing, cracking your carefully constructed carapace of the self.  

Much of my art tries to work the way dreams throw up images we might have forgotten, with broken, half glimpsed things which hint at a narrative without fully revealing it - that’s what I’m think I’m trying to do, when I remember!

You can see my latest collection ‘Thought and Memory’ at the Rochester Air Fair, 03/05/2024 in Rochester Corn Exchange - and it will be launched on my website the same weekend.