Sunday, February 16, 2014

Of Women and Time

I am revisiting a series. It's mostly about my mother and my grandmothers. I started this series several times already and stopped...then I created two lesson plans out of it in the last month (one for college students and one for little bits). Today I woke up and realized that the concept of time and memory was really important to me...duh. I wrote this shortly thereafter, everything finally made sense, and the words flowed like fine wine.

Of Essence and Time

We construct our own time, we color memory and nostalgia as we see fit. But how do we express the measured, yet ethereal? Is time linear? What does it look and feel like? How do we visually express a full life, or a portion of a life; a period of time, maybe last week, or today, this past hour? If you had to represent time and memory through touch, what would the experience be like?

Of Essence and Time is a series which deals with issues of time and memory through texture, line and mapping. Originally based on past low relief pieces, then developed as a lesson plan for students, I return to the concept to further my own understanding of "time", and in part, to have a solid record of my own remembering. 

As an artist with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the past can often be evasive. I have lost as many soft and sensitive memories, as I have large, definitive chunks; important periods that I really shouldn't be able to lose, but have. I find myself constantly chasing time, begging it to leave me more residuals, some residue, any kind of physical mark, proof. I feel the loss greatly when there are gaps. I fear it gets worse as I get older. This is little bits of my time and memory, fragments from the missing, collected visually.





 Ode to a Knitted Rainbow Scarf, 2013

 

No comments: