PARAMNESIA

The artist collaborated with six female, studying artists, wanting to grasp a sense of how the apparent childhoods of those who had each arrived in the same place, at the same time, compared to one another.

Each of these interactions were initiated by the question: “what is your earliest memory?”. ‘Reverting’ back to one’s first memory demonstrates the distortive nature of recollection in its purest form; of all the developmental periods, the early childhood illustrates an individual in their most impressionable state, where they will be reliant on anything and everything that can be used to facilitate their understanding of who they are and how they came to be.

Interested in the stress that was placed on the commodification of memory during these initial discussions, the artist aimed to construct visual representations surrounding the aforementioned colours and objects relevant to each memory.

With the formation of each subseries, she tried to remain inventive in capturing the errors and plot holes that  had been uncovered, whilst  also establishing clear connections to the fragility and pliability of memory retrieval. In some instances, she created illusions within the work by producing similar aesthetics through entirely different mediums to confuse the perception of the viewer; in others, she redesigned and/or rescaled the commonplace items featured in the original memories, to reflect how the participant has described their appearances in peculiar or exaggerated fashions. The surrealist movement has played a vital role in providing visual inspiration for these works, as it is this hallucinatory characteristic, formed through the interconnectivity of fact and fiction, that makes it so applicable to studies of memory.