“memory is a distant friend but a painful reminder”
The assignment for my 3D Sculpture course was to create a memorial for something or someone that is now gone. Wanting to create more than just a memorial, I wanted to create something that folks could recognize and interact with.
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15 ft x 10 ft x 12 ft
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Home video montage, miscellaneous household items, yarn, brown paper, fish string.
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5 weeks
My final work is designed to play with memory, permanency, remembrance, and loss. After losing my grandmother very suddenly in 2018, I was left with memories of her living room; coloring on the floor in a dimly lit room while she knitted, with the TV blaring old Hallmark cowboy films and a pine tree Yankee Candle scent filling the air. These memories are what I’m left with.
I recreated what I remember of her living room from my memory. The only real things from her are the chair and pictures on the wall, with everything else being made and designed to be what I remember of her place.
One last ‘real’ item was the video on the television, which played a compilation of family videos that I found. These clips include vacations, Christmas Eve celebrations at her house, and family gatherings in which her voice and presence is prominent.
The walls are strong in the center of the room, but start to fade as the room grows. How (in)permanent is this installation? How real (or unreal) are my memories of her and her living room? Science proves that memories are written and re-written again with every recollected of the memory by the memory-holder… so what about this room was true? What was real, what was fake, and what was created by the trauma of losing her?
