Remnants: an illustrated memory book
Summary
Remnants is an auto-ethnographic exploration of the malleability of memory and the imaginative potential that exists within the written archive. By implementing multiple tiers of removal (created through the art-making process), this projects highlights how memories degrade and rebuild themselves each time they are revisited. Memories are not bound to historical accuracy, and instead distort, abstract, and construct new narratives overtime.
Inspiration
"Memory is a narrative rather than a replica of an experience that can be retrieved and relived."
Marita Sturken (Tangled Memories)
"What is recorded as a mnemic image is not the relevant experience itself - in this respect the resistance gets its way; what is recorded is another psychical element closely associated with the objectionable one."
"Instead of the mnemic images which would have been justified by the original event, another is produced which has been to some degree associatively displaced from the former one."
Sigmund Freud (Screen Memories)
Process
Stage One: Revisit the written source.
The first step of my process was rereading my personal journal entries from Fall 2018. I combed through these entries and isolated key phrases that caught my attention.
Stage Two: Symbols and Icons
After isolating phrases from my journal entires, I responded to them visual in a loose and symbolic manner. For each phrase, I quickly (in less than a minute) drew a sketch which I felt represented the memory as written. In some cases, the representation was literal or easy to understand, but in other cases the result was more abstract. Eventually, I created a library of icons / symbols which were associated with the written content, but abstracted from the original memory.
Stage Three: Graphic Reconstruction
After forming this library of symbols based on the isolated phrases from my written journal, I selected a few which stood out to me narratively. Then, I created more refined and concrete graphics based on those chosen few. At this point, a new narrative began to emerge. The emotional essence of the memory was still present, but the content of the "story" was far more rooted in fantasy than the reality of what I experienced years ago.
Stage Four: A New Narrative Through Illustrations
In the final stage of the process, I responded to each graphic by creating a fully developed illustrations. These images are narrative-focused and fairly realistic. However, the contents are far removed from what I actually experienced. They tell a different story all together.
