Hidden Door, Group Exhibition, The Secret Courtyard, Kingstables Road, Edinburgh, 2015

“He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected…”

– Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle”

Fan of Memory/Profane Illuminations was a site specific installation I created for Hidden Door Festival in Edinburgh in 2015. Combining imagery from blue movies/vintage pornography, 70’s advertising, reclaimed windows and sound, Fan of Memory deconstructed the process of my own remembering to offer a critique of collective nostalgia and ideas of femininity.

Fan of Memory explored the intensity as well as the futility of memory. The sense of yearning, the obsession with detail, the endless repetition – not unlike pornography the images of nostalgia, create a version of experience that is at once idealised and also fragmented, eroded, incomplete.  Over time details become dislodged from their context – even fetishised. Memories gain an almost mythic quality – the past grows ‘ever mightier’.

SPECIAL THANKS – to Lynne Thermann, Andy Burgess, Haftor Medbøe and Graham Coe.