BETWEEN MOMENT AND MEMORY.
I am intrigued by the space between experiencing a moment and holding it as memory. Why do we hold certain moments in our minds and not others? How does the energy of lived experience transform into something we can carry with us, revisit, reimagine? This work examines our contemporary relationship with memory-making and our compulsion to document everything digitally rather than being present without mediation. Through the use of both cyanotype and paint, I explore the tension between capturing and experiencing.
The cyanotype process, with its deep blues and dependence on light, speaks to memory’s fragility and impermanence. These photographic impressions serve as triggers and evidence that a moment existed, and a prompt for the emotions and sensations that surrounded it. The paint layered over and alongside the photographic impressions represent something else entirely: the energy, the feeling, the intuitive sense of a moment as I remember it. The colours I use are not documentary but emotional, they are the hues I see in my mind when I return to these experiences. The source photographs were taken in Albania earlier this year on an old digital camera. I had deliberately left my phone behind, choosing to be fully present while still feeling the pull to record. While making I began to acknowledge that photographs do hold purpose, not as replacements for experience but as keys that unlock the sensory and emotional weight of memory.
Together, cyanotype and paint balance control and spontaneity, permanence and change. They create a visual language for something essentially untranslatable: the felt sense of being alive in a moment, and the evocation of that aliveness we call memory.
