HIGHLY COMMENDED
MOMENTS CALLING ACROSS AN EMPTY ROOM.
A teacher once told me in a drawing class, that people are obsessed with time: “You ask someone if they’d like a cup of Tea, and they check their watch first.”
This project focuses on our experience with memory,time and sentimentality. Through using photographic media, rust and collage, the work engages temporality as an element, creating a picture of materials undergoing decay. The materials here are in a state of transition, of being forgotten. Drawing inspiration from The Weird and The Eerie (Mark Fisher) and The Poetics of Space (Gaston Bachelard), we are invited to ponder what has happened, what will happen, and what we will forget.
Presented here are large-scale, multi-format assemblages. These assemblages reconcile concurrent cycles of making, each taking a different approach to temporality and memory; either through how they engage objects, the degradation of materials, or photography. The photographic element is important to my work, as it is a freezing, or rejection, of time. The collage then disrupts this; our notions of the past come under scrutiny and we are introduced to a different way of seeing. How does our experience of memory shift when it is torn apart and placed in juxtaposition with another image?
Photography focuses on what has occurred, collage focuses on what might have been. Photography is an exclusory practice; when the shutter is triggered there is a world beyond the frame that is left out of the picture. In my practice, collage has the capacity to reintroduce some fragment of this world-beyond-the-frame, and I engage collage in such a way that it becomes a melting pot for the experiences and memories that occur outside of the frame of the photograph. The objects present hold within themselves memories; these are bricks that built a home, steel that marked boundaries, found images of strangers. These objects are bought together to give them a new life, new memories. They look back on the past, and they ponder on the future.
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