STRUCTURED BODIES focuses on the never-ending relationship between memory, place and the body and explores these connections through drawing and painting. Driven by the impact of contextual surroundings on the self, the places we choose to inhabit, the places we happen upon randomly and the places we purposely avoid are endlessly intertwined within a folding fabric of our being.
Elahje’s practice engages the act of recollection and reflection to generate material that represents ‘re-experiencing’ through aesthetics. Intertwined figures, whimsical and deliberate mark-making and interminable compositional arrangements pay homage to continual connections shared between memory, place and the body.
‘In remembering we can be thrust back, transported, into the place we recall. We can be moved back into this place as much as, and sometimes more than, in the time in which the remembered event occurred. Rather than thinking of remembering as a form of re- experiencing the past per se, we might conceive of it as an activity or re-implacing: re-experiencing past places. By the same token, if it is true that all memory has a bodily component or dimension, the memory-bearing body can be considered as a body moving back in(to) place.’ – Ed Casey
These places are presented as poetic inscriptions, monuments even, to remind us of the importance of the three-way relationship between memory, place and the body in our universal lived experience. Place will always live within our memories, as our memories live within place.
