A Place I Forgot
Egyptian faience, grout, 2019. 0.5” x 17.5” x 11.75”
A childhood concussion sparked my intrigue with human memory and the archival acts that are taken to preserve these memories; writing, photography, ceramics—to name a few. However, nothing is immortal to time, inevitably they will deteriorate and fade into obscurity. By telling an incomplete and imperfectly archived story, my work seeks to explore the ways in which photographs, memory, and ceramic archives can warp and fragment over time. My medium of choice, Egyptian faience embodies this. Over time the ‘flaw’ in my material—efflorescence—will form a layer of salt over my images, obscuring them even further, and gradually my ceramics will erase themselves.
Three of my childhood friends gather together, while two others pass by. The figure in a blue dress holds a pink camera, a bag of snacks hangs from her hand. A strand of my hair enters the upper left frame of the camera shot; its presence exaggerated by the pixelization of the image. Similar to the way digital information is composed, I employed a grid to break down the information presented by my source photographs. Making the pixels larger than they are normally used causes the image to lose a great amount of clarity, but also makes each individual square much more important. By dividing it in such a way I wanted each individual tile to feel purposeful, with each colour decision lending itself to the larger image, and its own anonymous identity.