Memento 2000. Oriel 31 (now Oriel Davies) Newtown, Powys. Solo show.
Made over three years Memento was a slowly evolving project about the interface between reality and illusion and the nature of memory.
Memento began with the notion of making a series of concealed and wrapped domestic objects. The tender act of wrapping up seemed to be concerned with memory, the recent memory of the everyday, the familiar, the inconsequential. Objects around you at home acquire their own patina of personal history. They become meaningful despite their everydayness.
As time passed, I began to reflect on other things I have wrapped up and put away. I reflected on memories of childhood; making a boat in the sand, climbing a tree to see far off things.
The boat, the tower, the ladders and Winter Game grew out of these thoughts; imaginary elements in a distant narrative. The boat is poised at the moment of leaving, the very instant of departure, when day becomes night. All the other objects have become attendants for the journey.
Jinks is a play on memory as well as on the process of casting. Found branches were cast and entwined into aluminium rods to form a ladder. The original branches were entwined in a similar manner with wooden rods. The title Jinks comes from a childhood game where if two people say the same thing at the same time, they shout Jinks!
Winter Game was the last piece to be made. Based on a board game, it contains many of the elements from the exhibition in miniature form. These were not fixed but could be rearranged by the observer. There are elements of game in this work but also of architectural spaces and the melancholy of de Chirico.
A cloud installation of five large pencil drawings and collections of ceramic wrapped everyday objects. This about breathing and the passage of time. Each cloud is a breath, each breath from every day.
Small drawings form part of a visual diary that runs back and forward through the work. There is an enormous sense of release in drawing after making sculpture, where so much effort goes in to the mundane and the mechanical, such as making it stand up and stay in one piece.
Memento was reviewed by Richard Noyce in Contemporary Visual Arts issue 28.