Something Your Hand Touched 2021
ART, MUSIC + REMEMBRANCE
About the event...
Something Your Hand Touched: art, music and remembrance, explored loss, meaning and meaninglessness. Uniting archival found objects and photographs with non-objective imagery, projections, story, poetry and performances of moving tributes from local musicians, the event held space for the beauty of darkness and mystery in a culture addicted to positivity and certainty.
About the art work...
The world of things, specifically the things left behind when we die, provides a rich source of creative inquiry and archival arts practice. To address this inquiry, I used my deceased father’s archive of documents and photographs to explore melancholy as a desirable “aesthetic emotion” and investigate the complexities of photographs- as-images and photographs-as-objects. In my work, I addressed three types of melancholy: melancholy embedded in archival objects which tell stories of the past while remaining evidence of the loss of that past; melancholy embedded in the archive with its legacy of absent narratives; and the inherent melancholy of photographs in their function as reminders of loss and death. I committed archival treason by destroying a selection of photographic slides, and questioned what might be lost or gained by this action.
Although initially prompted by a personal impulse to see through my father’s eyes and meditate on my own death, universal themes of loss, memory, the fragility of the body and meaning/lessness informed my process. The creative works that emerged from this inquiry were exhibited in Something Your Hand Touched (2021) at the Caboolture Hub. Viewers were invited to a gentle contemplation of loss, the things we leave behind when we die, memory and meaning/lessness.
Something Your Hand Touched (2021). Collaborative installation created by the songwriters.
Huge gratitude to Charles Living, Margaret Shepherd-Tovey, Andrew Shepherd, Kelli Dendle, Tom Ryan, Larysa Fabok, Tony Rowe, Adam D'Lawrence, Maree Reedman, Lucy Gallant, John Roza and Moreton Bay Regional Council.