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Memory’s images

Memory’s Images was a collaborative project by Patti Lean and Kevin Phillips, producing a body of work in writing and painting in the submitted publication and exhibitions at Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries (Oct-Dec 2009) and StudioEleven Gallery, Hull (May-June 2012).

Our area of enquiry was memory retrieval as a catalyst for creative thinking. My own investigation began with Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913; Enright translation,1992). Proust voices themes of time, identity, class, culture, love and beauty, through a dying man’s retrieval of a past in which categorically different types of memory cue powerful evocations of dormant emotions. Smell, taste, sight, sound and affect are all active cognitive stimuli to memory; Proust privileges these perceptions over ‘traditional’ novelistic convention.

Memory events in the novel are various: involuntary, voluntary, psycho-sexual, somatic and visual ‘screen’ memories. In these ways Proust’s novel presages neuro-scientific exploration of personal recollection. Proust’s preference for ‘involuntary’ memory posits the agency of the subject in inverse proportion to the aesthetic power of the memory, ideas later developed through Merleau-Ponty’s ‘phenomenal world’ of embodied experience. Additionally, in the light of Foucauldian constructions of identity and Derridean deconstructionism, I was interested in production of meaning through visual form that triggers memory, and in possible commonalities of perception that reside below active cognition.

My project was to apply Proustian textual features to the process of painting, bringing my voice as reader, feminist and art historian. At the same time I found it necessary to put theory aside in order to engage in open dialogue with the work. I aimed for psychological space in my work by making ‘arenas’ of action that disrupted stylistic conventions like linear perspective. Mindful of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘knowledge in the hands’ I worked in open-ended ‘conversation’ with the materials; glazing, layering, washing or scraping back and forward.