Emotional Memory

I've been hard at work painting and writing. A new year seems to have brought me new energy. Deadlines help also. I have a show scheduled for my loss of memory artwork so I need to make a dent or it will begin to weigh on me.

I last shared a post with the beginning of a painting based on a Toni Morrison quote that equates "flooding" with "remembering". She talks of how the Mississippi River was straightened and in flooding the riverbanks, water finds its way back to the path it once carved. She spoke of it in terms of writers and the flooding of imagination. I think of it in terms of the emotional memory that leads us back to our well-engrained identity even when functional memory no longer exists.

Emotional memory leads us to the places and people that give us comfort, that feed some sense of who we were and how we still see ourselves. For example my mother likes when I come in because we do things together. Now the things we do are rather limited by her physical capabilities, but she associates me with activity and exploration because that was our history as we traveled together. It remains her emotional memory even as the details of our trips are long gone. Likewise her teaching years were very satisfying to her and hold warm emotional memories, hence her current activities of "cutting and pasting" (collaging) harken back to those times.

This painting is metaphoric, representing the path of emotional memory finding its way home. It is both painting and collage.To move it forward, I found I had to do something that seemed strange. I had to flood it. In my "omnipotence" I had created a river and land masses, together with the suggestion of homes. Now I had to extend the waters to obliterate them. It felt like a creation process in reverse as I let my flood take over, slowly rising over the land and trees I had so carefully created. I'm still debating writing a sentence from the quote over the painting.  You can see I began to do that and then took parts of it out.

The creation-destruction cycle actually is not an uncommon process for an artist. We often get too attached to a painting that is almost right, but not quite. Afraid to destroy our creation, we can remain paralyzed. The only way we can save ourselves is to let go and start over. I find covering a painting with white paint is my favored flooding technique on which to build anew, but here I was actually trying to mimic a flood.

This painting may do double duty in both the memory series and as a piece for the Jewish Artists' Lab exhibition on the theme of water. As a metaphoric piece it can work in many ways and certainly mimics the creation and destruction process contained in Biblical passages.

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A Perfect Memory

 "All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was". -Toni Morrison

I have two projects ahead of me with my artwork. One is a body of work on loss of memory which I will be exhibiting at a conference mid-year. The other is a piece on the theme of water for the Jewish Artists' Lab exhibition. Ever frugal, I am trying to find a way to knit the two together so I get some additional use out of the piece for the lab.

In this year's Artists' Lab we have a series of artist led sessions. Along with another artist in our group I led a discussion on the topic of metaphor and memory. We examined how water is used metaphorically in both the Bible and our language. I soon discovered that I had stumbled across a rich topic. Metaphor by its nature lends itself to artwork, creating layers of meaning.

In researching this topic I ran across the quote at the top of this page and found it quite thought provoking. Morrison talks of how for writers the act of imagination is bound up with memory and equates it to flooding, trying to find our way home. Here's what she says:

"Because, no matter how "fictional" the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory - what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our 'flooding'."

So how does this relate to loss of memory? One of the things I've observed in my parents as they lost memory was the way they clung to their prior identity. As I explore the question of what happens to identity as we lose memory, I have concluded that identity is very persistent. Even if they no longer possess the capability to do the tasks of their prior identity, it remains an important part of how they see themselves.

My late father was deeply involved in technology in his day, a man before his time in many respects. Then time passed him by. His identity as a tech savy person was deeply embedded and in his later years he had a propensity to purchase technology even if he could no longer comprehend it. He returned to the path he once carved.

Similarly my mother who had been a first grade teacher collages every day, but she calls it "cutting and pasting". She has a wall on which she has pictures of things that interest her that she calls her "bulletin board". She returns to deeply engrained aspects of her life as a teacher. Their world narrowed as they aged, just as the river's path was straightened, yet they flood its banks, seeking the life they once lived, the person they once were.

I've begun to play with some paintings on the theme of water. I've been away from painting for awhile so I have this barrier to crash, an uncertainty about where to begin. I find the best way to push past that gatekeeper in my brain is to just start, no research, just paint the imagery in my head, reminding myself that I can always paint over it. The images in this blog entry were a means to jump start myself and are likely to go through many iterations. The one above is on the concept of Flooding as Remembering.  I may write the quote over it when it is further along.

When I first thought of memory and water I was reminded of language that links the two, how we talk of memories bubbling up and streams of consciousness. Have you ever followed how a memory arises? Sometimes it can arise quite obliquely. Something triggers a tangentially related memory which in turn triggers another and another until there is a wave effect. The small paintings were an experiment in stepping into my mother's mind and creating waves of memory, Each image associated with one nearby.

She has been pondering lately if her father was left handed. A thought of her father might trigger a thought of her brother who her father asked her to look out for or of a dress he made for me as a child (he was a tailor). Memories move like water, fluid, wavelike, taking us places that may be far removed from our starting point.

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