Terms of Memory

The project explores the dissonance between language and material, having three different memories of my childhood home being burned in acid, re-printed and re-drawn over and over every day, for 9 days. A progress of memory.
The project was made for an exhibition titled “Work in Progress” that was shown for 10 days, each day  I added three more works to the project.

Is there a place our memories are stored in? A tangible, physical place we can go to and touch our memories? I go in my memory to where my childhood is stored: my childhood home. I try to remember it, to burn it down in my mind. I look for visible evidence of it, a photograph, a print that can be a proof. I try to memorise its details, like re-telling a story over and over again.
What will happen if I actually perform those actions? There is a big dissonance between language and material. To burn something in your mind is to remember it. To burn a tangible object, is to forget it, to vanish it from the world. Intaglio is to incise an image, a memory if you like, into a concrete object. To draw onto a metal plate and then burn it into the acid. The acid eats up the image, making it embedded into the material just like we embed a memory into our mind. But burning it too much in the acid can be dangerous: the acid keeps eating the memory, until there is nothing left to eat. There is no more material, no more memory. The same dissonance exists when you print the intaglio. Instead of having a proof, with every print the metal wears down, the memory flattens, becoming more and more vague. The more you print it, the more you will try to memorise it, the more vague it is. As for re-telling a story, or re-drawing and burning it into the metal, with every new layer of drawing the memory becomes more abstract and less clear.

If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burnt in

Friedrich Nietzche