According to Instagram, I posted the finished image of this piece about a month and half ago. But really the beginnings of this piece was sometime last year. It was a 21 x 10 inch mixed media piece that consisted of two panels, one of the trees, the other was a stiched fabric and encaustic piece. I think I even had that in a show. At some point, I disassembled it, took the stitched fabric off, cut it and added it to the trees again but kept the size to 10×10 inches. Then fast forward to two months ago, I took that version out of its frame and added the bottom. When I was working on it, I remember thinking about how so much of my work is about concealing/revealing. Obscuring. Hiding? Secretive? Protecting? The original piece was titled “Memory”. I’m keeping that but adding to it. Our memories are never as clear and reliable as we think they are. Memories shape shift and can become amorphous. We stitch them together and add embellishments to fill in the gaps or to fit our narratives.
And in the end, we will wonder how do we sift between what is real and not real?
“Intangibilty of Memory”, encaustic, cloth, thread, inkjet on rice paper, paper, alcohol ink, pigment sticks, 14 1/2 x10 inches. You can see an image of this piece framed over on my Instagram.
“My great fear is that we are all suffering from amnesia.” -Eduardo Galeano
I love the this piece, Bridgette. What you say about memory is very interesting. The truth is, our memories are actually far less reliable than we think. I researched this a while back, for various reasons. Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable type of evidence. Did you know that every time we think about a memory, we reconstruct and change it? So every time we recall it, the less accurate it is. After just one year, our memories of an event are only 50% accurate, even though we may think we recall it perfectly. Weird, huh?
Yes! I find it all very interesting. It’s kind of like that Operator game we would play with kids, except we’re just playing the game with ourselves. 😀 Thanks for sharing all that. It’s also interesting the things we choose to remember.