in-between

text

The supreme achievement of memory... is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.

 
Speak, Memory
Nabokov

‘In Between’ has its roots in a journey I made three years ago, a journey back to a piece of empty ground where countryside and farmland begin on the outskirts of Kyoto. Twenty years ago I spent two years living in the apartment block that once stood on that patch of ground - and in the years since I have pictured that apartment continuing to occupy its space overlooking the persimmon groves and bamboo covered hillside, and have remembered the drifting perfume of the incense and flowers of the adjacent cemetery. I was disoriented by the surprise of its unexpected absence on what was my first return visit to Japan.

Complex_moment print image

It’s a common experience to go back and to find the things we are looking for physically changed, or missing, the space they once occupied altered; to discover the evidence of time moving on, of material caught in-between one state and another. This particular experience made me think again about passing time, about how and where we locate and construct memories. It also prompted consideration of the instability and flow of memory, of temporal flux, how recollected fact is mediated by current circumstance and how connections are made across time, and between time and place.

None of which is to say that these works aim to evoke specific memories or to provide a sense of, or longing for, the past - I am unconcerned here with the visualisation of particular past experience. However, in writing this introduction I wanted to suggest where the process began as this has shaped the decisions I have made in developing this body of work. It has also determined the kinds of sites of renewal that I have searched out as starting points. My interest in this series lies much more in developing hybrid print processes – sometimes integrated, sometimes juxtaposed or in opposition – that might reflect a model of the present as a temporal multiplicity that is in continuous flux. I regard these print assemblages as constructions in which the ground appears to be in flux, images conjoin and recur in slightly different forms, scale shifts, structures move in and out of focus and individual works speak to one another around the space of the studio or across the gallery wall.