What’s Left Behind
A few weeks ago I visited the mechanics institute in Ballarat to view some of the collection of botanical specimens compiled by Ferdinand von Mueller over 100 years ago. These books were distributed around Victoria as educational guides and Ballarat was lucky to have scored a couple.
As I was looking through the specimens what I found most striking was not the actual specimens, although very well preserved and beautiful, but on some of the pages there was an outline of the plant from the pressing resulting from some moisture that was still present at the time, resembling a shadow of the plant, a ghost, a trace of what was there…
This got me thinking about what traces are left behind from our lives, all those objects and ephemera we collect along the way.
I often go op shopping or visit secondhand shops and find old photographs left in frames, which is so sad. When a person dies and there is no family left or family have the mammoth task of going through a house to decide what should be kept and what should be donated, things disappear, memories of that person become displaced.
Memories of a person can become a little like a shadow on a page, they can start to become fuzzy around the edges as time passes and disappear completely when there is no light source.
I like the idea of hanging on to a memory through objects, these objects become the light source. Whether the objects are from Nature or made by someone, these objects are an important medium through which to remember. My friend Emma used to collect a feather whenever we went out for a walk and since her death, when I see a feather on the ground I think of her and see the joy it brought her.
So, this is the basis for some new things that I have started to make. In-between working and life commitments, I will be giving myself time to focus on work that doesn’t have a price tag attached to it. Whether I show the work I’m doing or not isn’t important at the moment, I just want some time to create in a consistent way which I have missed for a very long time.
It seems to me that everything has been commodified, including creativity. But the thing is, our best work doesn’t generally come from the expectation of making a sale, our best work comes from wanting to share how we see the world around us because nine times out of ten, someone else feels the same way too and that’s how we connect to one another.
These ideas will be realised with my preferred mediums of clay and metal, and I’m looking forward to sharing some outcomes with you soon.