My interests lie in memorials and the variety of ways in which memories are either celebrated or hidden and the affect that airing memories good or bad, in public can have on others, sometimes altering previously held perceptions. My work is based on the memories and regrets I have concerning family members and friends who have passed away and deals with issues I have never spoken about before. Influenced by Tracy Emin, Grayson Perry, Christian Boltanski, and Susan Hiller and to some extent Jenny Holzer my work shows openness about my past and my family history as well as memory and memorial.
In a similar way to Tracey Emin’s pieces my work is autobiographical and confessional and, like Emin, I have used the traditional craft of needlework as a medium to convey less traditional messages. Questions and statements regarding my memories are hand stitched, hand written or printed onto fabric, photographs or copies of items that belonged to the individuals concerned. Hand sewing has become a central part of my work. Sewing is a lengthy process that allows time for reflection and thought, this reflection has become an important part of my work allowing me to ‘put away‘ the memories and confront my past. I have worked with fabric found in a scrap bag belonging to my mother and threads inherited from my grandmother, using these to create a patchwork quilt embroidered with aspects of my life.
The acknowledgement of memories followed by compartmentalising or discarding them is something I would like to explore; therefore I am also experimenting with other ways of archiving memories by making photograph albums and memory tins.
By selecting family photographs that could portray the lives of any family and annotating these in an album I have created something that looks ordinary or commonplace. Among the standard titles are written messages to the people in the photographs. Always loaded with regret and sometimes with shocking undercurrents the text resembles the hidden or covert social commentary found in the work of Grayson Perry, work that looks aesthetically pleasing but on closer inspection leaves the viewer feeling uncomfortable or disturbed.
I have begun to use old biscuit tins found while clearing my Grandmother’s house filling them with personal objects belonging to family members to create memory boxes. These tins form archives that seek to memorialise lives now passed. Christian Boltanski’s use of false memory has led me to question the reality and value of my own memories. Investigations into these thoughts have materialized in to experiments with tangled threads leading from hand-stitched text on photographs to memory tins and piles of personal possessions connecting the mixed up threads of thought to the truth of the objects collected.
