Memory and physical touch experiments

Experimentation attempting to combat being unable to remember experiences or being able to cope with things feeling as though they didn’t happen or didn’t exist by having to recreate how it feels to be touched by someone you love. Trying instead to make a permanent record of an experience, memory or feeling that’s important to me and that I dont want to lose as an experimental way of keeping fleeting moments my brain won’t keep for me.

This work was created through the use of paint to make body prints of myself and my partner embracing, the aim of the embroidery being a tactile surface that could be touched in an attempt to form a phyical anchor between a textured surface and a memory – inspired by the concept of body memory and the connection between temporality and past events and lived bodily experiences. I hoped that by making a record of the places where our skin touched each other and the environment that could be made into a raised surface to stimulate the sense of touch as the canvas was touched at the time, combined with the movement of running my hand over the embroidery, that I could hijack the body’s link to experiential memory in order to store the sentimental experiences that my mind struggles to hold onto. This experiment was short-lived as the results didn’t produce the results I was hoping for. I had to recognise that the barriers to my accessing memories were internal, and couldn’t be overcome using this method, at least for the work above. I’ve considered that part of the reason this idea didn’t work in the way I had wanted it to might have partly been due to the prints being made with the intention of trying to make this sort of work, and so perhaps didn’t hold the level of sentimentality and emotion needed through my focus on the process distracting me from using the embrace to truly feel a connection with my partner. Additionally, I feel the sensory texture of the paint and the rush to remove it before it dried down on my skin likely took me out of the moment as it was happening. So it’s possible that the concept itself isn’t the issue but instead the way in which I made the piece. It’s something I would like to experiment with further in the future.

The work above was a continuation of my artistic experiments using paint to create body prints. However, with this piece I leaned more towards the feelings I experienced with first attempting to come to terms with my sexuality as a young teenager and the idea that my interactions with the same sex had somehow become tainted by the realisation that I was gay. I struggled with feeling that by simply touching someone else in ways I’d previously not thought twice about, I was contaminating them. Now I’m older, I question whether this concept that I was dirty in some way was due to the internal turmoil caused by my own fears about how they might react to me if they knew about the secret I was attempting to hide, not only from them, but from myself.

At the beginning of this year I spent some time taking prints and casts of my hands to further explore concepts of both my impact on the environment as an alternative way of approaching the idea of creating a record of my lived experience outside of my own memory. As well as some of the work below being a message across time to my childhood self and their need for connection and physical affection. By recreating my palm print, I had the thought that perhaps having an interactive work that encouraged each visitor to touch or hold my hand in some way, whether through the use of a cast, print or a performance piece, that I might in some way make up for all the times I wanted to reach out to those around me when younger but didn’t feel able to. The use of Alginate for casting is still a relatively new process to me and it took a few tries to get the consistency and timings correct in order to produce the desired result.

Further to my palm/hand based experiments- I wanted to create a pattern from my palm print I could use as a guide to embroider into, following on with a similar concept to the previous embroidery work above. To do this, I scanned my hands at the highest quality I was able to, before importing those images to my ipad and methodically tracing the lines to make the image below. I then traced this onto a fine piece of canvas fabric and experimented a little with raised embroidery techniques with the aim once again to make a tactile artwork my audience could interact with. I moved on to making for some of my other ideas shortly after starting the embroidery work so the piece remains unfinished. I’m not sure whether I will return to it or not, however I have noticed an interesting trend within my making, where I tend towards time and labour intensive concepts that seem at odds with my distractable nature. I think part of the reason for this could be my feeling that the more effort I put into the making process, the more the emotion through my struggle to stay dedicated to finishing it will find it’s way into the viewers experience of the final product. The issue being that, especially during these experimental phases, I tend to move from one idea to the next quite quickly as my overall understanding of the concepts, emotions and experiences I’m attempting to explore deepens and develops into something more substantial.