Curated by Charlotte Grayland

Remembering Right Now by Charlotte Grayland

Through this particular selection, I have found myself drawn to a combination of photographic and cinematic responses, as well as tactile, sculptural installations. The combination of these mediums and works in response to memory, or reflections on history, seem to capture both physical space and time, where sculpture becomes encompassing and all consuming, and digital media becomes a portal to recollections or reflections on the past.

Each artwork here has a clear attention to detail, where specific mediums/ actions have been chosen to expand the artist’s concepts into the spaces they inhabit. For example, through the work of Clare Barber, we see a meticulous recreation of physical process, to transform something mundane (a jumper), into a visually astounding sculpture. Ngo Chun Tse's Lecture Performance, presented as a live work only; possesses a clear sense of transience, as audiences have to be present in the right place and time to catch a performance, exploring memory and lost fragments of cinema history.

By investigating memory in these varying ways, these artists have opened up avenues to connect individuals to heritage, culture and past experience.
 

The Weight of it All, 2023 - 2024

Quilted, embroidered, blanket containing collected pebbles, reworked telephone seat, printed fabric, audio loop (03:00)

Lisa Risbec

A retelling of a personal grief ritual; inviting the audience to listen, sit and reflect. The blanket is embroidered with an incantation or poem, quilted and then filled with pebbles collected from the beach a year earlier after a bereavement. It aims to soothe and comfort, and sits alongside the bench to create a space to reflect. The installation also features an audio loop, text and field recordings, placing the audience at the site of remembrance.

The work is shown in several configurations. Depending on invigilation conditions, the audience is invited to carefully handle the blanket, providing an additional sensory experience or view the item as an object or a wall hung piece.

I just want to go back, back to 1968, 2024

Ceramic tiles, SLA and FDM prints, LCD screens and mini computer with Unity application

Amy J Wilson

Ceramic stoneware tile-set made using a custom 3D printed roller, airbrushed with underglaze; MDF table with 3D printed components; scale-model satellite with two LCD screens and working hinge, designed, 3D printed in resin and assembled by the artist; live simulation; micro PC; spotlight.

I just want to go back, back to 1968 reimagines the Zond 5 luna flyby mission, in which two tortoises were the first terrestrial beings orbit the moon. The work conflates this animal history with Grey Walter’s Tortoises, the first artificial animals, immortalising the cosmonauts as an artificial simulation.
 

Mother, 2020

HD Film 16 minutes

Asuf Ishaq

Ishaq’s film ‘Mother’ weaves relationships with his mother and unravels memories between their recollection, in a conversation centred around a fifty-year-old photograph of his mother. The photograph is treated as a family archive; an object that carries its own story.

The artist moves through spaces, gathering up histories and memories that are lost or covered over in the movement of displacement and begins to produce new knowledge. By exploring the photograph with his mother, and involving her in his art practice, a space is created where they normally would not overlap. He carefully explores the photograph and the surface as skin, untangling his mother's memories and thoughts. The film shows the repair process of the photograph occurring in the bright space of the virtual environment. The photograph is a transitional object. Objects could be considered as any external object that a person creates a bond or relationship with. The house is explored concurrently, just as his mother's home, faith and prayer are shown as stable and strong as the walls of the house.

'Self-portrait projections' From the 'I don't wanna be the best...I just wanna dance' project, 2024

24x36" giclee prints

Sally Waterman

'I don’t wanna be the best, I just wanna dance' is a meditation on the artist’s childhood memory of learning to dance, in order to overcome her shyness and defy the trauma of school bullying. 

This set of six self-portraits projects the only three analogue photographs from the family album exist that provide evidence of her experience as a young dancer as well as stills from the 1980s TV series, ‘Fame’ onto her middle aged body. 

Séance II: The Arrival of a Train to Orson Welles,  2024

Lecture-performance

Ngo Chun Tse

A lecture-performance, I weave together rendered images and historical analysis to trace the evolution of stereoscopic imagery. A central element of the performance connects to Orson Welles’s unfinished epic, Don Quixote, highlighting the fragmented layers of lost and incomplete cinema. This work seeks to investigate the complex interplay of memory, myth, and the forgotten narratives within cinematic history.

Shimmer Effect, 2024

330 x 150 x 200cm

Claire Barber

‘Shimmer Effect’ explores the role of memory in my creative practice through a meticulous attention to the surfaces of a hand knitted jumper and the lining of a dome tent. Through the insertion of delicate pins and the creation of a warp-like structure I have attempted to consider what I may learn from these objects. As natural sunlight shines into the attic space of Salts Mill the installation becomes an analogous landscape in my locality that shimmers with life. I relive the experience back into the objects in an attempt to capture the spirt of what has been remembered.