THE PLACES WE CANNOT RETURN TO
Paintings of Memories Reignited, Exploring the Absence of Him.
This project explores the relationship between memory, emotion, and personal loss. Anchored in my own lived experience, it reflects on the fragmented nature of memories surrounding a passed father and moments from childhood that are emotionally potent yet visually incomplete or distorted. The project seeks to examine how the strength of memory, whether clear or fractured, can still hold deep emotional resonance.
I use painting as a tool to navigate these varying degrees of recollection, aiming to give visual form to both the ambiguity of the past and the vividness of the present. Elements such as abstraction, fading imagery, and softened edges are used to represent forgotten or unreachable memories, while stronger colours, defined forms, and sharper compositions are used to express moments of clarity. This juxtaposition mirrors the emotional tension between grief and ongoing connection, presence and absence, remembrance and forgetting.
This concept explores the act of remembering through mourning, the distortion of personal history, and methods of representing grief and memory. Through analysing the conceptual choices in my studio practice, I consider how visual language can translate the elusive nature of memory. It also reflects on how personal archives function not just as records, but as emotional triggers, and how painting offers a space to reconstruct, reinterpret, and preserve what is slipping away.
‘But The Window is Closed’
what remains is not him,
but the trace of sense,
in the room they once shared,
it fills my nose,
the curtains sway,
but the window is closed,
the dust rises,
but the window is closed,
the smoke intrudes,
but the window is closed,
the space between is all that remains,
what was,
hands,
that I cannot hold,
I make tangible what once beat,
and what remains is not him.
@helenaxk.art