Essay: The Matter of Memory | New Contemporaries Writing Commissions 2022
Ciara Otuokere, Ancestral Landline, 2021. Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of New Contemporaries
Text commissioned by New Contemporaries responding to the work of four artists showing at Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022 exhibitions in London and Hull.
First published on New Contemporaries in February 2023.
Memories like objects accumulate over a lifetime, stacking up in busy moments, folding over one another - only to eventually fade out of sight. Eva Hopper reimagines old toys from her childhood, transforming them using craft techniques to create voluptuous sculptures that embody feelings of yearning and love. In her installation Dissembling Bed (2021) a wooden doll’s bed is covered in crocheted panels from which thousands of wool strands spill over its edges, pooling on the ground in vermicelli-like swirls. Drained of colour and encased in soft fibres, the boundaries of this milky-white object become blurry and ill-defined - a doodle of a memory suspended in space. Through the time-consuming act of embellishment, Hopper pays tender homage to a once-cherished possession while acknowledging the universal truth that everything (and everyone) in this world will ultimately be lost to time.
The ephemerality of the everyday, can urge closer examination and offer up an opportunity for reinvention. In Ciara Otuokere’s practice, natural and found materials are presented as artefacts and memorialised through paint as she explores the subject of spirituality within the African diaspora through the lens of ecology, art and ritual. In her painting Ancestral Landline (2021) a speckled vase props up a skeletal figure, its arm raised across its chest and three leaves laid at its feet. A ceramic old-fashioned rotary phone is topped with a wooden banana placed gingerly on its cradle. Also included are leaves and a ball of matted fur. Otuokere speaks of the ‘ceremonial domestic’ and through her careful grouping of organic and man-made objects, seeks to create a sense of order, pointing to the potential for quotidian rites to invoke the divine.
If ordinary objects can be activated by the performance of a ritual, what might the materials they are made of teach us about our place in this world? Drawing upon theories of new materialism and the post human, Nicole Sheppard invites the viewer to contemplate their evolving relationship with the matter - both living and not- that surrounds them. In her floor-based sculpture Entanglement Study: I (2021) a twisted pile of sacks stuffed with sheep’s wool rests upon a concrete slab. Swathes of netted fabric emerge from the crevices while the bloated forms hug a steel armature rising from the tangled layers like an oversized vertebral column. Despite its girth and seemingly inanimate presence, this heaving assemblage of concrete, plant-dyed fabric and wool is prone to shape-shift over time like our own ageing bodies, challenging us to resist anthropomorphising its squishy organ-like curves.
While Sheppard explores notions of material agency, Rosalie Wammes evokes the intangible, translating visceral memories from her childhood into sound. In her installation There will be Time (2021), we encounter a pair of sculptures made of burnished terracotta perched on metal tripods facing one another as if in conversation. Standing between these misshapen megaphones we are enveloped in the soothing sounds of ceramic flutes - recreated by Wammes from memories of sitting beside her mother at church as she played the organ during service. Wammes’ sculptural arrangements open up a sacred space for meditation as she expresses a desire for duration to marked by personal memories and a deceleration of the passage of time.
To remember is to draw a line between our past selves and present. Taking varied approaches, these artists investigate the human condition through the lens of memory, storytelling and time. They encourage us to reflect upon our increasingly tangled interactions with the environment and our relationship to the objects that surround us, as we seek to find our place in the world.