Fay's flowers

Rebecca Belmore suggests that, “…the land harbours memories that we cannot always locate,”[1] and while this notion fuels my work I have turned from the landscape outside my door to the archived landscape. I have looked towards my own past, and extracted images from a family archive built by Grandparents. The images I have been working with come from a selection of landscape slides taken by my paternal Great Grandfather of the Okanagan Valley, BC in the 1950s, and images from my maternal Grandmother’s rose-garden in Everson, Washington taken during the same time. This post concentrates on the work that has come from the images featured in Grandma Fay’s rose garden.

Grandma Fay has always had a luscious garden. When I was young, roses filled her front yard and winding paths lead you through pockets of growth. I used to ride a small, ceramic donkey pulling a wagon of more growing things, tucked into another corner of her crawling garden. She lives in a small town, her neighbours are miles away and her property bordered by cows, potato patches, railroads, and more cows. The roads in her town run along the perimeters of farm land, so miles and miles of straight lines and four way stops, where the miles of road come to meet each other from all directions. A section of two-lane-farm-road ran in front of her house. One year a local development project expanded this road and subsequently flattened her rose garden. This body of work Fay’s Flowers is in homage to her landscape, flora, and archive.

The installation above features the archival photographs I used to create the video details, and the woven textile, which depicts a replication of a flower arrangement done by Grandma Fay in the 50's.

Details investigates the interiorized spaces of the land through archival landscape images, images that pinch a single moment from an expansive narrative. An investigation of memory that takes place between the paper image and myself, the human body gathers experience, and the human consciousness remembers that experience. Therefore, a dialogue between memory and the landscape dematerializes when the conscious body is removed. Details uses archival floral images taken from Faye’s garden and reshapes them into a digital fabric, which I have integrated with a resilient moving image. In this way, the fragility of the floral archival image, both its age and the nature of its history, is seen through a changing set of associations supported by a consistent force. This renegotiates the narrative and opens the frame to a fluid dialogue between landscape, image and memory.

(details video stills)

I have been developing ways to transfer these archival photographs into illuminated digital image formats, manipulating and altering the way the photograph can be re-imagined (retold). These transformations of the image reveal an aspect of the visual that was not there before; they become important metaphorical markings, rather than homeless floral documentation.

I use both textiles and video to explore the landscape’s potential to contain memory and to renegotiate place in the archival image. It is the individual qualities of these mediums that offer the appropriate avenues for the subject matter I am passionate about; the way that images can be brought together like patchwork, fading and overlapping, the lure of subtle movements, looping and replaying in the electronic image; and the stitching, binding, layering, and holding together of the detail and labour-intensive textile process. Each medium influences the other: video elicits qualities that pertain to more tactile sensitivities, while the textile exhibits attempts to expose the luminosity of the video pixel. The tactile sensitivity of fabric and the ephemeral illumination of video enable something as intangible as memory and as personal as a landscape to be the subjects of inspiration. It is both the landscape and the narrator that facilitate a memorial of experience. The landscape then contains more than visual and physical establishments it preserves pockets of our past.

An investigation into the whereabouts of memory in the landscape has led me to an inquiry of place—the place of a landscape image and in particular an archival image. Lucy Lippard points out, in The Lure of the Local—Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, that place is “a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, resonance of a specific location that is known and familiar.”[2] In this case, place is a location in the landscape (the organization of space) that is familiar because of memory and history. An archival image can lose its place but it is the conscious body that locates it through narrative attempts. It is the conscious body’s desire to remember in order to facilitate a location that feels like home, a “psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation.”[3] The archival image needs conscious eyes to continue to exist in a place, eyes that renegotiate place and locate both the body and the image.

Martha Langford’s study of photographic albums, in Suspended Conversations—The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums, reveals a direct link from photography to memory in the retelling of the event or moment depicted. One might sit and flip through an album thinking "I remember when..."

Langford also questions, in reference to the documentation of rituals, why there are no images of the ritual of looking through albums and remembering? Perhaps the many incarnations of Fay’s Flowers attempts to document the ritual of looking at the archive, remembering, and retelling.

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[1] Dot Tuer, Reforming Memory – The Act of Storytelling in the Work of Rebecca Belmore in “Mining the Media Archive: Essays on Art Technology and Cultural Resistance.” (Toronto: YYZBOOKS, 2006), page 168.

[2] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local – Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. (New York: The New Press, 1997), page 7.

[3] Ibid., page 7.