The Shape of Remembering
Future Past Exhibition Essay by Taylor Hall
The shape of remembering
Future Past Exhibition Essay by Taylor Hall
Memories are a fickle thing. Finding their home in the slippery context of our psyche, to look back is fleeting and abstract. Like a folding clock, what we once were edits and blurs with who we are in the present. The most banal features of the past acquire value, even longing, by virtue of being the irrecoverable experience of our younger selves.
For artists Kathy Mack, Leisa Turner and Emily Puxty, nostalgia is made manifest in the physicality of their art making practices, converging in the group exhibition Future Past. Together their work demarcates a time once lived, sewing the threads of the past into the very fabric of the present.
This convergence of the three relishes in the dichotomy of their differences and similarities. The female perspective, the fragile materiality of the ceramic object and the reparative act of art making surfaces as a through line. Born from this foundation, Future Past muses on nostalgia’s deeply personal ability to proliferate into our present.
Acknowledging liminality as a space of both trauma and transformation, Mack’s suspended, ceramic installation Dream Avenue gives the viewer permission to find comfort in standing ‘at the threshold’.
Positioned in the exhibition space’s entryway, fragile, porcelain symbols of sailing boats, perforated spheres and impressed ‘leaves’ cascade in a fragile tensity. Hung in an archway formation, the work reminisces on the Foša Land Gate, a historical landmark located in Croatia’s Adriatic Coast. The teetering fragmentation of the work as a whole come to terms with an uncertain, fleeting entry way into the unknown. The physical act of passing through this archway translates feelings of displacement and a state of in- between, indicating Mack’s reflexive migrant experience.
The transformative quality of porcelain and the artist’s process of impressing the surface of clay further conveys this sense of loss and separation of cultural connections. Here, clay harkens its cyclical ability to be formed, fired, used and discarded back to its original state. Complexities of cultural authenticity are highlighted through the artist’s act of imprinting each piece, and the shadows cast by these delicate forms ask questions of the real and the imagined.
Twisting and turning in the breezes’ gentle waves, the installation evokes a coastal essence, and the sense of wistful transience. So it seems, when you live with a history of loss, the things you are able to keep, to hold on to and cherish – these become the shape of home.
Turner’s photographic work depicts objects reminiscent of childhood - a doll house, a dapper blue rabbit, a quaint toy plane - broken and fragmented beyond repair. Neither useful in their decorative beauty or original function, the artist nurtures the photographic memory of these items by hand-stitching the separation of their fractures. Keenly aware that this act will never return the object to its ‘perfect’ state, the gold thread of her interventions brings tender attention to their flaws. Leveraging the traditional Japanese art of Kintsugi, each work embodies the profound philosophy of embracing imperfection and finding beauty in the broken.
Highlighting her role as a mother of two girls, Turner’s work acts as a letter to her daughters - who as they grow older, and childish innocence begins to shed, bare the weight of womanhood. Turner reflects, to be a woman is no easy venture. Veneration of perfection, bodily pressures, and the guilt of fault begin to seep into the soul. Reminiscing on her own childhood, a time of innocence and wonder she cannot regain, the artist seeks to shift perspectives on the imperfections life leaves us.
This body of work reveals that objects provide both nostalgia as well as a cure. They function as proxies for childhoods that have been lost, moments that you cannot regain, memories that exist simultaneously in the present. Each ‘repaired’ piece becomes a symbol of resilience, impermanence, and the beauty of embracing the scars life imparts us.
In a contemporary world in which we can access so much, there-in lies a common misconception that the ownership of material things separates us from living and experiencing fully and vibrantly. This understanding views the tenure of things as a simple frivolity, the unnecessary icing on life’s ‘cake’. This effect subsumes the realm of the decorative, traditionally conceived as a feminine domain.
Putxy’s sugary, ceramic forms highlight our familiarity with pottery in its most intimate domain, and sheds this shallow viewing of the kitsch. What emerges is a powerful haptic and symbolic language, physically resonating with the communal spaces of the home. As a collection of opulent objects, adorned with candles, the works can be read as an alter, or memorial, to the memory of girlhood. A time where the visible world around you was a potential plaything. One may reminisce on dress up boxes, Polly Pockets, stick on earrings and chalky eyeshadow palette’s. Her small sculptures imply this delicate functionality. Each ceramic candle holder gives way to arrangements of hearts and bows, curls and twists of clay, amidst glossy, black glazing.
By revisiting her experience of girlhood, both in its materiality and naïve, child- like sensibility, her works disrupt the worship of ‘rational’ and ‘logical’ objects. Further legitimised by the exhibition space, Puxty offers a revision of her past girlish femininity, seen now as a tribute to her present womanhood.
In an group interview the artists excitedly muse that their collection of work for Future Past feels as if it is creating a home in the confines of the exhibition. It is a familiar, comforting space that allows one to feel as curiously present as they are soothingly melancholy. Revealed in junctures of each artists’ work is the intersection and fragmentation of time, and our ability to reflect, ruminate or rewrite our nostalgic imprint. Here, the art object takes the shape of remembering as a tangible thing existing in the now, imbued with the past.
Inserted within this essay, the author has included personal, reflective anecdotes as an act of joining the exhibiting artists in remembering, further blurring the presentness of this text with her own wistful past.
My grandma’s house always had the same, recognisable smell. Best described as a combination of the subtle sweetness of gardenia, Pears soap, musk and brown sugar. When she made the bittersweet decision to move into aged care, the family knew it was the closing of a chapter. We recognised the inevitability of time, the ticking of life’s clock.
As we passed through the door of her house one last time, I silently acknowledged what was once the four walls of our present, now was housed in the confines of our psyche. That comforting smell now permeates my mind.
I love you so much and you have made my life complete.
I didn’t know what life was like without you now.
I hope our relationship will be full of love and happiness, that we can talk about everything and anything, just like your nanna and I can.
Excerpt taken from Taylor Hall’s childhood time capsule written by her mother Michelle Hall on the day she was born, 19/04/1997.
My parents recently relocated from our family home. In the moving process, the sheer quantity of things amazed us all.
We combed through the mass of objects, ranging from pre-school pasta necklaces, dilapidated Christmas ornaments, a mangled cardboard robot (that evidences a father-daughter holiday project), to the multitudes of items gifted by my late nanna (that, despite their condition, we couldn’t bare to discard).
This detritus, in that moment, transported me the multitude of a remembered home.