Memory is ever present, transparent, and intangible at times, yet it gives us knowledge and an anchoring point for the next day and the future. If we were to have no recollection of the past at all, we would have no foundational understanding of our present life. We have so many different types of memories, some that are pure information, text, or an idea that can be expanded on like opening a file cabinet in one’s mind. Plato says that our knowledge of universal concepts is a form of recollection. We also hold memories of experience and reality that become ambiguously complex in the way we think and capture a moment in time of the past. The way of remembering is specific and an individual process that is difficult to describe to one another. Sometimes it is difficult to articulate the space or the context of something that happened in the past, but one only feels the emotional component of the memory’s sensation. In other cases, the recollection of memory is very placed and one could draw a picture of the setting, what was heard, smelled, and talked about with specificity. When one tries to remember music, this comes more naturally and is preserved in one’s ability to recount pitches, almost as one of the most truthful memories one might have. Being able to remember specific moments of the past and time probably means that there was a particular frequency that the ‘file cabinet’ was opened and speaks to our control of our memories.
I am exploring the imagery of how we think of memories and are able to explain them to others. To illustrate these feelings, I made a stream of consciousness ink painting that became more gestural and emotional to search or attempt to explain how I think of memories. These elements in the large scale ink painting became a collage of perceptions of memory that I am able to print with on fabric, which has been a freeing expression of the fluidity of memories. I am exploring colors that feel like the ‘fading away’ and ‘the difficult to grasp’ in more muted tones, as well as some brighter and warmer ones that become fond of the past. I am interested in how the colors and patterns work with one another and the interaction between different fabrics in the same print but with different colors and how these interact with one another. The combining and reconnecting process involved in cutting and sewing multiple fabrics together and the overlapping of printing after fabrics were sewn is my active thought processing of the past. This blend of language and techniques come together as a fabric of memories quilt that has the ability to manipulate one’s perception of real space and how they remember it.
11 x 11 ft. collage of cotton fabric dyed with MX fiber reactive dyes and found fabrics of various fiber compositions that were table dyed and silkscreened with pigments and sewn together.
Inspiration and Process
An ink drawing 10 x 10 ft. was created based on reference imagery and gesture to create the silkscreen repeat below.
Final Repeat
