Acne on Memory employs expanded painting and collage practices to engage with anxieties surrounding everyday emotions, memory, and femininity. Methodologies of playfulness and uncanniness are mobilised as strategies to confront repressed feelings, generating a personal archive that offers a sense of refuge and safety.
Within the title, my work positions itself at the intersection of past, present, and imagined futures. Some memories, like acne, surface suddenly and stubbornly—erupting with intensity, only to leave behind lingering marks. The project holds these ruptures, both playful and unsettling, guiding a navigation between tenderness and discomfort, fragility and resilience, while engaging viewers emotionally and reflectively.
This MFA project explores memory, trauma, and femininity as uneasy, contradictory, and inescapable. Expanded painting and assemblage form a fragile archive and provisional refuge for these experiences. Like Alice in a Wonderland stripped of innocence and filled with absurdity, I navigate the space to play within its rules and discover survival strategies suited to my being. Rejecting socially prescribed notions of happiness, I trace the anxiety hidden beneath its sweetness. Through intimate archival spaces, emotions flow, allowing reflection, release, and the processing of identity, memory, and affect toward emotional healing.
