Memoire

This memoire, presented as both an art object and a written piece, served as my dissertation for the MA European Fine Art Masters: Art, Society, Nature program, which I completed with Distinction from 2021 to 2023. This MA was an Anglo-French collaboration between The Margate School and the École Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen (ESADHaR).

ABSTRACT

This memoire is a reflective, autoethnographic piece of writing that starts where I began on the course, with the death of my Mother and continues to look at absence, loss and mourning through my own practice, as a tool to create art work. I offer this memoire as a book of broken pieces to be reconstructed by the reader. Each chapter begins with a conversation with my Mother from my birth to her death. These conversations give a brief glimpse into our relationship and can be read in tandem with the fragments that follow or entirely separately. I do this as a disruption of narrative which is an idea I will continually return to and that is central to my work. As a documentary maker and storyteller in my professional life I have used this MA as an opportunity to rethink narrative structure and its limitations.

The memoire is broken down into five key themes; object, non-object, memory, absence and presence. These themes are used as lenses through which I present my work. I use artists (Sophie Calle, Anna Fox, Song Dong, Louise Bourgeois and Dayanita Singh), theorists (Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Byung-Chul Han), writers (Proust and Annie Ernaux) and the filmmaker Sylvia Schedelbauer to discuss my work in an expanded field. My methodology is that of collage and relies on conversations, recall, memory and multi representations in order to explore how the elements of loss, grief and mourning can breathe life into and find presence in a creative practice.