How do we know that our memory of people, events and places are accurate? One individual’s recollection can differ so greatly from another’s. A photograph can provide us with some evidence, but not a complete truth. A conflict between presence and absence exists. We are reminded of what is not shown. There is a tendency to embellish and embroider depending on individual perspective. Slippage refers to this inability to access the truth or the real and the layering effect of memory.
This body of work explores the concepts of memory, perspective and imagination. The series consists of layered photographic images of landscapes on georgette cloth. Georgette is a fabric commonly used for making domestic curtains or filmy women’s clothing and scarves. Printed separately, a blurred indistinct image is overlaid onto a sharp clear photographic image. Details stitched onto the top layer act as an embellishment, a superimposition of perspective. These works are disorienting, hovering between the real and the surreal, yet they draw the viewer into a secret world.
They are internal landscapes; hazy locations; the sites of remembrances. The viewer is given a mind’s eye view of the site of a long ago event. There are no people present in these works. They are absent, leading one to embark upon a series of suppositions as to the significance of the scene. Slippage works as a series of stories with open endings that are at once playful and disturbing.