space for debris: echoes of memory
Camille Thomas, Kari Lee McInneny-McRae, Naomi Segal
Brunswick Street Gallery, 2017.
This exhibition brings together three artists exploring the poetics of memory. Fragmental memories are rendered through a gentle exploration of materials such as paper, cloth, glass and ceramics. The artists draw attention to surface treatment and materiality, creating a dually sensory and sensitive experience that recovers echoes of the past. Here, visitors are invited to contemplate the fragility and malleability of memory. The human inability to keep memories intact is treated with melancholy; all three artists meditate on the experience of memory as an unstable and intangible narrative. However, there is also a comforting note as the recovery of cultural and familial memories is represented as a source of stability, informing one’s sense of self.
Kari Lee McInneny-McRae is a Melbourne based artist who predominantly works with sculptural materials such as clay, wax, wood, metal, resin and plaster. Her work considers the way that materials can be in a state of flux, whilst paralleling the way that memories change over time. Objects investigate how her own memories can be solidified into physical form. The abstraction of something intangible such as memory into an actual sculpture is a way of exploring how memory warps with time.
Naomi Segal is a Sydney-based artist from a Chinese-Jewish background, whose practice is concerned with the vulnerable process of cultural recovery. For her, artmaking initiates acts of remembrance: reconnecting with old family photos, speaking with family about the past, etc. Through a combination of drawing, printmaking and storytelling, Naomi interweaves her fragments of inter-generational archive with motifs of Classical Chinese literature and paintings - fostering a more active engagement with the unknown.