‘Fear of Forgetting’ is an exploration that has turned into an obsessive, archived, memorialised, and recorded trace of someone’s existence. The display is not a shrine, rather a kind of museum in miniature, one dedicated to the deceased as well as to the psychoanalyst.
The collection attempts to pass the memory onto the viewer so as to ensure the survival of this person. The piece represents the culmination of a preservation process:

it presents a pattern through an accumulation of carefully chosen details, retrieving and reassembling a collection of fragments that have been researched, donated and created. Many of the items originate from comments, observations and memories of the deceased in letters sent to the artist. There are also aspects of the artists own involvement and how she has been affected by this experience, in tern looking at how traumatic life experiences can affect a person.

I came across some photos my father took when he was renovating our family home in the 1970’s. It seems he was a bit of an amateur photographer. I suppose I consider myself an amateur drawer, so drew my father’s amateur photos. The result was an interesting space between reality and fiction, rather like a memory. Most photos are considered a true representation of what is being observed;

whilst drawings are a representation of what the artist imagination is observing and therefore perhaps unreliable. Memories are very much unreliable. Even when looking at a photo, our memories can fail us. By remaining clearly photo like, and drawn not from real life, the drawings sit in the middle of these two parallels, they represent the transient quality of memory.

A projector continuously shows slides in a repetitive fashion on a 10 second timer. 7 out of the 80 slides project an explanation and picture in a typical ‘missing poster’ style of each member of my close family that has died. The empty slides leave space for the onlooker’s own missing person, their experiences and memories.

The viewer is invited to reassemble the reality of these lives from the reported details of my last memories with them.

The drawings of cob webs comment on memory and fragility as being things that can change too easily, thus there is a need to record them. Initially you are not aware of the drawings until you get much closer to the carbon paper. The contrast between the bold placement of the pieces and delicate drawings shifts the focus between the internal spaces of thought, emotion and memory and the external physical word.

The precise placement of the drawings looks at how the act of remembering plays on an idea of order and a desire for balance. The repetitive arrangement of the drawings suggests that this could be just part of an almost infinite archive and offer the ultimate anonymity of death.

I embarked on a personal search for a closer connection to my deceased Father. There was a need for a coherent ‘life story’. The idea of a fear of forgotten memories directed the project into a piece of art work. With photos collected from family albums and donated from close family friends along with letters I received describing my father, I began to search for traces of my father’s past to create a body of work that used one personal life story and experience as a metaphor to explore the impact of trauma and memory.

I created an environment where people with different histories could feel a connection to their own memories and how those impact on their identity and experience. The collection of artefacts reflect personal identity, remembrances and memorial, yet as all the information I had was second hand i.e. were other peoples memories. They also offer us new ways to map the behaviour of memory.

I wanted to extract some of the reflection from the letters, the remnants of memories, other people’s memories. The thoughts the authors had to locate, thoughts that are just coherent, memories trying to be articulated. Once out, permanently in flux, like a floating presence.

I embossed the letters onto tracing paper, revealing a tactile, white mark that can just be understood, like an unreal sense of loss.

In one of the letters, one of my father’s closest friends invited me to work in his forge over the summer. My father had worked for him in the past. My natural doodle is a flower. For me flowers represent life and hope, elements that the Letter project produced. I worked with him for a week in March to produce a wrought iron flower.

Delicate and intricately designed wallpaper encourages the viewer to look closer; however the fluorescent colours and the enclosed space make for an unbearable environment.

The viewer feels intrigued and dizzy; they might want to stay in the room as much as they want to leave.