Installation Documentation of Narrating Remembrance
at the Marblehead Arts Association
at the Marblehead Arts Association
Artist Statement
Narrating Remembrance
“Narrating Remembrance” is a collection of mixed media drawings exploring personal experience with rising painful memories in a context of universal human ability to hide such histories deep within. Recently some of my recollections came more consciously to the surface as I remembered a darker side of my childhood: painful persecutions of my Dissident family while growing up under Soviet Russian regime. I remembered general and minute anti-Semitic acts, attitudes and their repercussions involving painfully subtle but directly influential discrimination and oppression on the basis of gender and nationality.
With simple tools of drawing I have been reproducing dream bodies reflective of emotional memories relating to specific events: the images are of an adult appearing a witness to intense feelings of a child from a distant past. The bodies are stiff, tight and isolated: in fright and tension, echoing individual and political binds. Wrapping the figures in imaginary material, with each fold I commiserate with personal and collective painful histories, while adding a real element of cloth ties the drawn women with this reality. Thread knots and bulks of fabric express accumulated strata of life’s minute and general, inner and outer occurrences and recollections, tied within, tied without: unraveled and interwoven events of past and present. Sewing paper with a sharp needle is as enjoyable to me as marking it with soft core of a pencil and I am mindful of an act of coping and mending, in and after a crisis.
With simple tools of drawing I have been reproducing dream bodies reflective of emotional memories relating to specific events: the images are of an adult appearing a witness to intense feelings of a child from a distant past. The bodies are stiff, tight and isolated: in fright and tension, echoing individual and political binds. Wrapping the figures in imaginary material, with each fold I commiserate with personal and collective painful histories, while adding a real element of cloth ties the drawn women with this reality. Thread knots and bulks of fabric express accumulated strata of life’s minute and general, inner and outer occurrences and recollections, tied within, tied without: unraveled and interwoven events of past and present. Sewing paper with a sharp needle is as enjoyable to me as marking it with soft core of a pencil and I am mindful of an act of coping and mending, in and after a crisis.
Article in the "Salem Evening News"
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