2017 holding still

I took one day each month to create a painting of flowers freshly picked from our garden. I saved the flowers and, once dried, sewed each arrangement inside silk or cotton fabric scraps; embroidered with a number of red dots to signify the month. Taking the vases out of the kitchen and into my studio to paint, highlighted their presence and domestic role. Each vase has its own history within our family, as well as being the result of the ideas and expertise of the individual or company that brought them into being.

The paintings are both a visual response to a selection of flowers grown by my husband and a way of expressing my experience of life as a procession of fleeting moments that leave intricate traces woven into my psyche.

Painted each month they represent a timeline where the chronological order is locked into the substance of the work. But like memories, these elements have endless possibilities for being grouped in new ways. For an exhibition at St Albans Museum and Gallery, the bags of dried flowers, the vases and the paintings were pulled away from their trios and out of chronological order, questioning the nature of how we experience time.

This is part of a series of visual diary pieces, an ongoing process started in 2012. Each year, I use a different process and create a new body of work. Central to my practice is this concentrated, regular and contained effort to explore the nature of time, memory and loss.

Details about the exhibition, Imprinted, with Suman Gujral at St Albans Museum and Gallery can be found here.

 

Photographs by Joe Fordham, 2018