Memories (Souvent me Souviens)

Palimpsest - a descriptor of an object or idea composed of layers.  The layers can be historical, geological, chemical, or memories, our own personal colleced data.

The wonderful Complicite play, Mnemonic, reminds us that  human memory is far from being perfect, but is an approximation of the previous memory, and sometimes, unbidden, an embellishment, a re-imagining in technicolour of those wonderful moments, or a deepening of the pain and hurt of small slights. We also chose to reveal only those layers we wish others to see, or only those layers we can bear the memory of ourselves.  It is an uneven and personal palimsest that is explored in these paintings, and installations.

It's No Holiday (2024) consists of strips of tape, reused from the sister work, Random Acts of Memory (2024). The edges of the  lush Tremenheere garden in the latter, green-splattered, are the decline of biodiversity in It's No Holiday and the Cornish holiday is re-remembered as  walks alonealong cliff and beaches whilst elsewhere cricket, more cricket, was played.

Using her typical layerig of paint, and collected botanical materials, there is a fusing of ideas and thoughts about nature, and the way we have leant on symbols to describe those difficut feelings.  Rose petals gathered from her own garden, and the dark red petals (discarded Valentines roses on the morning-after Soho street) are used in a series of paintings about love.  But dessicated, crushed and pounded, the petals  have no soft fragility.  The love is tested, broken, wanting.  It is also false, the reddest of petals are airfreighted from factory farms whose women-workers' hands are stripped bare by thorns and paid little for the priviledge. 

The memories are not always personal.  The installaton Souvent me Souviens (Often Remembered) was commissioned by the Reford Gardens in Quebec and sited on a piece of land by the St Lawrence Seaway where two homes were washed away in winter flooding.  No longer zoned for housing Nagan created a transitional piece - a place for the community to gather and use as a garden, and a boardwalk criss-crossing the tideline from land to shore and over athe rip-rap boulder edging that was too meagre to prevent inundation.  At each turn of the boardwalk, sheds are memory capsules and express a relationship between shore and water, people and the estuary (whose other side you cannot see, even on the balmiest of days). In one shed hang bottles, kilner jars, each to be filled by visitors with their own memories and ideas, ready to be metaphorically cast out to sea.  Another becomes a stick-magnet, attracting the driftwood which litters the foreshore, spikily facing the water, with one  breakthrough branch  whose red roots make it into the interior of the shed and speak of the ephemerality of putting down our roots in a shifting place like this. In a shifting climate like this.