Intangible Memories’ Keepers

Have you ever felt the need of being home? Have you ever questioned where home is? Is it a physical, emotional or mental place? Where are the lost homes we no longer live in yet long for? Where are those ideal and imagined places that marked our childhood? Where are those places that belong to a different, distant time, occupying memories, inspiring recollections?

Through strong poetic and symbolic images, my work addresses the universal longing for home. I am interested in working with recollections and remembrances associated to people, places and objects. I believe memory is a crucial element when determining one’s identity and it is what allows us to extend our identity beyond the actions and experiences we can personally remember. Thoroughly exploring this intimate topography and family resonances, I look to not only restore my own story, I want to create works that evoke the ages of life, the passage of generations, the ghosts of our history as well as the memories of domestic and emotional landscapes of our time.

I am currently exploring the concept of ‘Home’ through the exploration of the architectonic stereotype of the ‘house’. Secret places, unique places, the houses we have loved and lost, continue to haunt our dreams. What do they tell us? And could it be that the sound of these places of memory, so personal, is reflected in all of us?

Through my work I want to question the loss of the physical home to show how this fatal fact can create another location for ‘home’ fantastic or illusory that evokes its memory. My goal is to invite the viewer to have an evocative experience in the exhibition space.

The search for lost ‘houses’ and the pain of their loss produces emotional weight, nostalgia that lives within us and awakens through reminiscence. Yet, the ability of recording experiences enables us to reproduce them from memory, as well as to rebuild them. By creating imaginary homes and giving them physical form, suggesting their presence, absence, emptiness, and fragility, I wish to provoke receptiveness in the spectator to connect emotionally to my pieces and to offer them an alternative way to remember. My pieces, intangible memories’ keepers, make of the imperceptible something visible, new places, intimate spaces in our minds for these ‘houses’ to exist. In this way they are meant to be experienced as the act of remembering itself.

In the development of my pieces, I explore both physical and intangible elements of reminiscence can be evoked through the senses. I use fabric, which is somewhat fragile and easy to model, as well as other materials like paper or beeswax. Through their use, I wish to suggest that home and its essence are in fact transitory. They can be linked to clothing and essential materials that bare symbolic meaning in our everyday life—belongings that we carry with us and with which we can re-create ourselves somewhere else.

Through my work I wish to recall the pain of the impossible homecoming by creating poetic images that arise from the imaginary reconstruction of the lost home, as a promise to rebuild an ideal place that lies within. The recreation of home away from home becomes autobiographical, nourished by the experiences of our personal spaces and their associations to our early years, family, past and present. The process of ‘building home’ is therefore something personal and ongoing. It is the construction of an imaginary refuge. My ‘homes’ are all imaginary places, poetic homelands for our immaterial memories.