Fractured Playground
Fractured Playground is a body of work that explores the fracturing of memory through unrealised futures. When recalling a memory, distance and imagination distort the original image, creating an unstable reconstruction that becomes fragmented over time. What remains are partial echoes of the past, blurred by the erosion of recollection.
I am interested in the dissonance between memories created by me growing up in the UK as a child and present memory, where imagined futures and personal connections overlap to create a space of uncertainty. Using painting and printmaking techniques such as solvent transfer, linocut, dry point, and screen-printing, continuous layering disrupts the surface and mirrors the disjointed nature of recollection. Each layer becomes a trace, an imprint of something lost or rewritten.
Physical processes such as sanding, ripping, and layering become metaphors for how memory is constructed and eroded. This material fracturing speaks to the tension between permanence and disappearance, as the act of remembering universally results in the forgetting of memory. Scale amplifies this tension as the large, collaged surfaces demand both distance and intimacy as you search for coherence within the fractured whole.
I am not wishing to recover a fixed or truthful image of memory, but to reveal how recollection shifts through absence, imagination, and time. The instability found within these works parallels the instability of self that emerges when memories begin to decay. This project utilises painting and printmaking to explore the spectral nature of memory, where process becomes a means of understanding what cannot be fully remembered.