Andrew Motion opened the exhibition (transcript of opening remarks by Andrew Motion)
Personal and public memories are recorded in a variety of ways. This exhibition focuses on just one of those ways: language. Using words, some of them contemporary, some centuries old, the artist makes language visible in the imagery (shape, colour, scale) of personal letterforms which are painted or drawn.
No two people share the same collection of memories. A personal memory-bank is as unique to the individual as his or her DNA profile. We record—or ‘keep’—memories in a number of ways, one of which is by the use of written language. My work uses words not as a novelist might, but rather as an aide-memoire to trigger ‘rememberings’, both of a personal nature and those too of a shared, public experience, for example memories of a specific war.
As I experiment with making language visible, I explore the gestural abstraction of the imagery of letterforms themselves. This reflects the manner in which writing is itself an abstraction from spoken language. Just as memory by its nature abstracts from experience, so letterforms abstract from writing and are per se an abstract art-form. This permits an open, inclusive, interpretation of memory. The fluidity of memory and narrative is not fixed or limited in a way that a traditional pictorial approach would be.
All this raises questions: –
- about language itself
- about the contexts in which we ‘keep’ or ‘store’ memories
- about why we do so
- about the arbitrary signs and signals we use to record language
- about how much we engage our imaginations in recalling memories
- about the limitations of language
- about the gestural nature of painted language and its aesthetic.
Some of the sources I work with are identified (for example, Wilfred Owen and David Jones) while others are anonymous as in Requiem Aeternam from the Latin Missal. My own personal lists are a source for the ‘Diary’ pieces. A quite different source is imagined memory, as in the work ‘Kilvickeon’. In this painting, a remote burial site on the Isle of Mull, is taken as a place of remembering, a place of memories. The headstones you see today appear to represent the sum total of people buried there, but nothing could be more misleading. The vast majority of the people buried at Kilvickeon in the last 1,400 years have no headstone, no marker of any description. Their memories, and the memories of those who buried them, have gone ‘unkept’. When standing in such a place it is natural to imagine some of them. The way folk remember their ‘departed’ has, at its root, a common, shared experience that reaches across generations and cultures. This piece is not a metaphor for all such places but more an attempt to ‘recall’ what has happened in this particular location on the Ross of Mull. The painting, a palimpsest, also stands as a point of reference to engage the imagination in its ‘search’ for unkept memories.