Memory

Works for 'Chicken or Egg?' an Arts Council supported exhibition of work in response to chosen pieces from the Cooper Gallery Permanent Collection, Barnsley, South Yorkshire.

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There are many wonderful images in the Cooper Gallery Permanent Collection, but it was  two very different paintings that attracted my attention.  Not because of what they portray but because of their age and condition.

A seventeenth century painting by Peter Gysels [1621 - 1690] is believed to be the oldest in the collection. The image is obscured by a dark patina - an obscuration from the smoke of wood and coal fires, from tobacco, tallow candles and marks from the fingers of many handlers. Unknown but tangible traces of its history, its existence and great age, shroud the surface, a symbolic material memory.

While a nineteenth century painting of Greenwich Park reveals a different form of degradation. Zealously over-cleaned in its past, many of the figures are transparent and ghostly, they present a faded memory of the actions of both artist and restorer.

Both paintings, whilst attractive images, appealed more as historical objects, their condition part of the focus of my work.

Interested in representing 'memory', I sought to develop a series of visual representations of what 'memory' could be.  These 'art objects' each hold their own memories but are unable to relate them; their physical appearance consequently becomes a metaphor to describe the abstract principle of remembrance.

Together they pose the question, are we products of our memory, our experiences, just as these works, old and new, represent a visible product of existence?