I recently visited an artist’s website, www.naomimiddellman.com and in her statement found these words “…we assemble and disassemble our memories depending on who we are talking to and the context in which we remember things….a process in which we imagine, we tell stories, we construct and deconstruct in order to make sense of who we are.” In her art (also on her FB page) some memories have become handstitched landscapes, but their irregular edges suggest fleeting or ephemeral details.

With over seven decades of personal memories and many geographic relocations on three continents in my lifetime to draw on, I’m interested in how my creativity using fabric, thread and words has been influenced by my own memories. I googled around a bit and found this interesting resource on memory and art for students which I’ll spend some time exploring at more depth.

When we were young, we usually received books as birthday, Christmas and other occasional gifts, and we were encouraged to browse and read everything we found on the bookshelves in our family’s and grandparents’ homes. Particularly influential were the 7 volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia (c.1920) with articles on all kinds of things and sets of pages of photos of, for example, rocks and minerals, or different native peoples from around the world, trees, of flowers, national flags, shells and so much more. Another very important book for me was Every Day Things For Lively Youngsters, one of a series in which the author, TJS Rowland, explained how simple things worked or happened. His works introduced young readers to the basics of Life including physics, chemistry, weather and through the workings of every day things in our lives. One article was about heating water to form steam, or cooling it to form ice. I can still remember the illustration explaining how wind blows humid air from the ocean over the land which cools as it rises to cross hills and mountains, making the water vapour condense and drop rain on the ground below. The illustrations were very diagrammatic, all in black/white with stick figure humans. I’ve just realised how important this book has been on my interests that continue from childhood to the present. It’s influenced how I express myself and have used my natural instinct to teach or demonstrate to others.

And talking of stick figures, a few months ago I discovered tadpole figures, and have been starting to think how to make them expressive without becoming complex:

I’ve always been fascinated by ancient history – and enjoy seeing reports of new archeological discoveries, bringing more understanding about Man’s distant past with information gleaned from patient study of cave and soil deposit records that demostrate Man’s interaction with the Earth’s surface from the earliest times right up to today.

And now that my own personal memories span 7+ decades, I have a strong sense of modern history, too. As a young child in the 40s I remember Australia still being part of The British Empire, of King George VI’s death meaning we had a queen, Queen Elizabeth II. That whole new reign changover kept me enthralled for a good 18 months. The Suez Crisis had a huge negative economic effect on the apple and pear production of our state as the bulk of the annual crops were exported to UK and Europe via the Suez Canal – the orchards were largely dug up and the government forced farmers into other production. Even as young as we were, we understood from the way the adults talked that this was very serious. Other big memories were the excitement of Sputnik1 the first satellite (Russian) launched into space; the erection of the Berlin Wall; The Cuban Missile Crisis; John Kennedy’s assassination Our own Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared while swimming off a popular Victorian beach and such was the state of world tensions in the Cold War that some even speculated he was kidnapped by Russia. Those were the biggest events I reemember up to about the time I left school in the mid 60s. The rest of the late C20 and the first 24 years of this C21 are full of equally memorable events which today reach us instantly through modern communication technology. In my childhood though, news of remarkable history making events reached us first on the radio’s morning, midday or evening news. Next day we saw important pictures in the newspaper that was delivered to the house before breakfast. Weekly radio current affairs programs and printed magazines provided content and analysis. When we went to a movie ( “the pictures” ) it was always preceeded by a week-old Movietone newsreel, and it was not until I was 14 that we had black/white TV in Tasmania. For several years Mum only hired it for the school holidays, and when we returned to school, the TV set went back to the shop. Eventually the manager told Mum she’d virtually paid for it and for another $20 she could keep it, and it then became a permanent fixture in our house. The whole point of this exercise of course was to prevent us becoming obsessed TV-watching morons at the expense of our educations, but I doubt her determined strategy made the slightest difference to any of us 🙂

Reflecting on my portfolio of 40+ years, I can can see how memory is embedded everywhere in my art, and yet my fibreart has never become a pictorial narrative. Rather, it reveals my broad general view of my world through lines and patterns, primal shapes and sometimes specific colours in my compositions. So the influence of memory in what I produce won’t be immediately obvious to most. I contend that the very best statement an artist can give about a work is a brief, well chosen title as a starting point for a viewer’s personal interaction with it. However if an actual artist statement is really expected, I go for brevity:

The statement for this work reads – Irregular triangles out of alignment within a distorted grid are a statement of the current geopolitical state of the world, where widely accepted rules-based order has given way to chaos in which the risk of major regional wars breaking out seems more dangerous than it has been for decades. This disrupted grid is regular enough to suggest my optimism that relatively peaceful organisation may yet be restored. 

Below The Tideline – Artist Statement – I love glitter, and this call immediately told me ‘fibreglass’.  It was challenging to work with this slippery, shiny fabric so unlike the linen of my experience. I used beads from my collection, and the patterns emerged as I stitched.

I began writing another blog pickledgizzards.com several years ago to build a record for our kids of my own and their family life memories, including foody things, because food is such an important part of our memory.