Memory States

 “Fragments that lead us to understand or see the impossibility of understanding”

                                                            William Kentridge

This work explores traumatic memory.   It speaks out of personal experience but not of it.  Instead it aims to evoke the extraordinariness of the traumatic narrative.  And to do as Louise Bourgeois suggests and “physicalize the problem”. .

Each piece is a captured fragment.  A different exploration of a state of memory.  There are gaps between them.   They are not a narrative or logical sequence.  They are attempts to convey something both ungraspable and incomplete.  Encounters between the past and the present.

Jill Bennett identifies how traumatic memory resists the normal processing of memory.  “It’s sensory character rendering it inimical to thought.”  William Kentridge writes of “A struggle between the paper shredders and the photocopying machines… The forces of forgetting and the resistance of remembering.” 

The work picks up Kentridge’s metaphor of the photocopier and paper shredder, and the natural language of print: - repetition; layers and surface, to pursue the nature of such memories and their manifestations.  It encompasses both traditional processes in wood engravings and modern technology in the laser cutter and the Xerox machine.

To see further images from this body of work please click on the link HERE