Memories, whether they are happy or sad they always remind you of a certain time or place, the same as smells, which can call up memories and powerful responses almost instantaneously. They have given me a lot inspiration to create my body of work.
Losing my Dad has been very hard to come to terms with and putting my feelings onto canvas, into video and sculpture has been cathartic. A sculpture I made was of a cabinet, which I smashed up and carefully put back together showed how angry and emotional I was just after loosing my Dad. It took me a while to create the piece titled, “Dad” because of his death and I could not look at pictures, smells or songs of him. My personal loss is a universal human emotion. “Dad” was one of the hardest to create because it brought back a lot of happy but sad memories for me.
After creating sad memories and showing how I wanted to hide away I went onto creating happy memories of friends and events. Capturing them on canvas, with smells, songs and on video.
I have explored using different sound tracks, voice recordings of school friends and using song. Which has worked well together because of the images that go with the sound.
I have created a lot of drawing pieces with a smell attached. One of my pieces titled, ‘White Linen’ is a pencil drawing of my friend and myself on a night out. I have rubbed white linen candle wax all over the canvas and it smells like my friends washing powder. I think this gives it a more personal ‘smell.’
I have used lyrics on some of my work because I did not want to use sound for these. When you listen to certain songs they bring back certain memories, so I decided to write them instead to see if it would still trigger that memory.
