Artist's Statement

Title of project: The Subjectivity of Memory

Drawing on an archive of paintings made over a period of time, I revisit, reassess and reconstruct past images using digital printing on fabric before adopting a process of folding. Stitching and gathering in determined ways hides and reveals, suggesting gaps in memory, feelings of vulnerability, fleeting glimpses, and an unreliable testimony to the truth about memory. Sehnsucht: translated from the German as longing or yearning, a fleeting glimpse, or in a wider sense a type of the intensely missing.

Gilles Deleuze, (1925-1995), refers to "The pleats of matter and the folds of the soul". These difficult abstract concepts have become important influences on my practice. Deleuze sees the fold as an image of conceptual space; a virtual landscape; an heterotopia. To unfold is to increase, whereas to fold is to diminish, to reduce and to withdraw into the recesses of fallible memory.

Recent research indicates we do not simply "save" our experiences like files or photos on our computers, but that the process of remembering is a subjective experience in itself.

The objective nature of the observation and rendering of the folded fabric in oils, underlies the subjective nature of the reconstruction process.

Deleuze,G [Trans.] Comley,T. (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: The Athlone Press, 1993 ISBN 0 485 12087 9 (pbk)