- Title
- "I've always known this place, familiar as a room in our house" : engaging with memory, loss and nostalgia through sculpture
- Creator
- Reed, Kesayne
- Subject
- Memory in art
- Subject
- Loss (Psychology) in art
- Subject
- Nostalgia in art
- Subject
- Sculpture -- Themes, motives
- Subject
- Art therapy
- Subject
- Sculpture -- Exhibitions
- Date Issued
- 2015
- Date
- 2015
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MFA
- Identifier
- vital:2513
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020022
- Description
- My exhibition draws on Andreas Huyssen's notion of memory sculpture to articulate my own sense of loss and trauma, due to the divorce of my parents. Within my work I explore the effects that divorce had on me and how it has disturbed my normative understanding of home and family. I have created scenarios alluding to the family home that I have manipulated in order to convey a sense of nostalgia and loss. By growing salt crystals over found objects and/or cladding them in salt, I attempt to suggest the dual motifs of preservation (a nostalgic clinging to the past) and destruction (due to the salt’s corrosive properties). In this way, the salt-crusted objects serve as a metaphor for a memory that has become stagnant, and is both destructive and regressive. The objects encapsulate the mind’s coping methods to loss. In my mini thesis, I discuss characteristics of memory sculpture as a response to trauma, drawing on Sigmund Freud's differentiation between mourning and melancholia. I also unpack how objects and traces (such as photographs) may act as nostalgic triggers, inducing a state of melancholic attachment to an idealised past. I address these concerns in relation to selected works by Doris Salcedo and Bridget Baker, and also situate them in relation to my own art practice.
- Format
- 51 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Humanities, Fine Art
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Reed, Kesayne
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