My practice is concerned with memory both our own personal memories and society's collective memory. In the course of my studies, I have developed an interest in how the memories we choose to recall and the memories we choose to forget shape our own personal narrative, what historical novelist Hillary Mantel refers to as “the scaffolding we build to hold our lives together” or what psychoanalyst Ernst Kris terms “our own personal myth”. Part of this myth is the importance we sometimes bestow on inanimate objects; we imbue these objects with memory and meaning and become attached to them. In their essay The object of my affection: attachment security and material culture, Taryn Bell and Penny Spikins expand on this phenomenon, they argue that objects can hold an emotional significance, they have agency and play a role in material culture. These ideas were foremost in my mind as I considered my much loved but badly broken earthenware bowls as source material for my latest series of work.
