Month: March 2019

How do we remember?

Hackney 365:

This second part of the exhibition is the culmination of a photographic project in Hackney . The same photograph was taken every day for a year. I was not in Hackney every day so it took longer than a year to collect the 365 photos in the slide show.They were not taken at the same time of the day. I chose a cycle and pedestrian crossing across a main through road in Hackney. People pass through at great pace and my project captured a fleeting history.

The photo was taken as soon as the camera was set up. (This rule was broken on only two or three occasions.) The camera captures a fleeting moment. The momentary memory of that instant has been captured in the drawings ,paintings and lithographs. Also I wanted to try and capture all the images together, hence the contact sheet. Traditionally in photography most images and memories are discarded from the contact sheet for ever. I have preserved all the images. As memories get reinterpreted and changed so do these images as they are reinterpreted in different media, stripped back to the barest essentials from the memory of the photo image.

The slide show, although on a loop, is in date order. The works are arranged to follow the chronology of the slide show.

Adam Forman March 2019

Why do we keep memorabilia of our lives? Is it to remind ourselves of our past life? Or is it for others to remember us by?

“Memoirs let people fashion themselves into characters they want other people, if not themselves, to accept.”

(Maya Jasanoff The Dawn Watch p52 Biography of Joseph Conrad)

 Helen de Mouilpied was born in 1914 and died in 1987. Thirty years later the material she kept about herself is presented by the artist through his own memories.Your own interpretation will confer significance to these memories. Why was this material kept and not other items? What has determined the selection from the material for this exhibition? 

That selection and assemblage is further opportunity for fallible interpretation and invention.How does this material trigger our own ways of remembering?

Immersing ourselves in the details of past lives can reinforce our sense of presence and belonging in our own lives.This first part of the exhibition is made up of diaries, photos letters and other physical memories. Displayed chronologically it makes up the substance of one remembered life.

There is a fallibility in the interpretation of what someone leaves behind, both by those who knew them and those who did not.I knew Helen de Mouilpied well but those who did not will interpret her life through memories from their own.

All the material in the exhibition had been kept by her. There is a strong local connection.The family lived close by at 47  Cholmeley Park for some of the most formative years of her life. She attended Channing School and later lived on Grove End Terrace at the end of the war and for the first years of her second marriage.

Adam Forman March 2019