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Life affirming lines

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.

ascendingPutting a pencil to paper and making a line is unexpectedly, and thankfully, life affirming. My dad died last year, followed by my friend Joanna and our family dog, all within weeks of each other. This is an exhibition of how drawing helped me to keep my head above water. For a few months, drawing everyday became a very centring experience and has ultimately changed the direction of my work.
Memories are not tangible. What is a memory? What is it made up of? If you open up a brain you don’t see a memory in there. A pattern of neuronal firing explains the physical processes but there is so much more than the purely scientific to memory and our consciousness. A thought, a fleeting picture in our mind’s eye, a memory of a smell. Can we do that, remember a smell? The memory of a sound, someone’s voice, how is it that we can recall a tone of voice in our heads? We conjure the person up before us but can only grasp at wispy threads of what once was. 13.ink balgy 2 jan 2013 smallAnd how we remember will be influenced by what has happened since and where we are now, so it can never be an exact replica of the moment being remembered. Sometimes that’s a good thing. It protects us. Even when we do manage it, it is very hard to hold on to the recalled sound, image, place, person for very long, just seconds if we’re lucky, and so much more is embroiled in the sensation of remembering than those discrete senses I have just mentioned. They all combine to make much more than a whole. The sad irony of making artwork that stemmed from an interest in memory and duration, whilst simultaneously losing my dad to Alzheimer’s, has not been lost on me. The progression of his illness laid bare the gradual breakdown of his ability to engage in anything other than the present for any length of time, and again by that I mean seconds. panorama rice paper birds 1 smallHe often talked about what was directly in front of him – or out of the window, of aeroplanes flying over the garden, of birds, ‘dicky birds’ as he refers to them in one video – in the months before he died. I remember now that he called them dicky birds when I was little, again I’m effortlessly collapsing time, years, decades in to seconds as I write. The complexities of the human brain, how it functions or deteriorates when combined with the heart wrenching confusion of emotional attachment are an overwhelming combination. At times I stood back fascinated, detached, at others I wept and still do.
In the past I have used video and sound in my work and I began working with video stills a couple of years ago in order to slow time down, all the better to examine it, experience it, relish it even. A freeze frame from a video has a different quality to a still photograph, it is charged with fleetingness.
24-4-13 april birds smallMy dad became a master at living in the present, he taught me a lot, with his loss of understanding of time, his loss of something – I’m not quite sure what. Eventually he had no concept of money, no sequential understanding of the order of events, no concept of linear time, he became like Donald Crowhurst, the subject of Tacita Dean’s film ‘Disappearance at Sea’ (1996) , a man lost at sea for weeks with a faulty chronometer, he had no physical geographical reference points or idea of time. Crowhurst eventually lost his sanity and it is assumed he jumped over board. Then there was my dad, lost at sea, in his own front room on a land locked suburban housing estate. As he forgot his previous life and who I and other people were and how we were connected to him, the worries of a lifetime were lifted from his shoulders and he lived a contented and happy life for a while, well cared for, loved and funny. What we experience right now, this second, has already gone. By the time we think about it consciously it can never be reclaimed. That is quite something to realise.
In this new series of work I have taken some of the apocalyptic looking local landscapes and migrating birds as my reference points, all inspired by stills from videos – (one of migrating geese when I was with my dad in a car park in Beauly). Echoing my inner state with my outer world, there is a comfort to be found in the predictability of migration, the goodbye, the letting go and then the circle of repetition. In this work I’m combining my present, with what went before in order to wrestle something concrete from the ephemerality of life and create something which projects a little into the future.
As most artists try to I imagine.
Lisa is currently exhibiting at the Rhue Gallery in Ullapool Ross-shire Scotland IV26 2TJ, opening days/times: Mon-Sat 10.00 -18.00
www.lisaobrien.co.uk
https://www.facebook.com/LisaOBrienArtist?ref=tn_tnmn
wwww.rhueart.co.uk
References
http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/shows/view/tacita_dean2/ (accessed 3 June 2013)
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/tacita-dean-recent-films-and-other-works/tacita-dean-recent-films-12 (accessed 3 June 2013)

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Posted by author: Lisa OBrien

7 thoughts on “Life affirming lines

  • This is very touching and the drawings are beautiful. I find it very interesting what you are saying about memory and timescales. I agree that some memories are so fleeting that they are not tangible. Other memories are so rooted though that they can seem so very real. A couple of years ago I was asked to take part in a group exhibition, ‘The Force and Form of Memory’ at the Compass Gallery in Glasgow- it then toured. It was in association with The Forget-me-not Trust, which is a charity for Alzheimers. We were asked to write down some of our thoughts about memory. I found it hard to do this so ended up writing some poems in association with the paintings. I found poetry a good medium for dealing with memories- perhaps because words are spoken and then they are gone, whereas an image remains. Your drawings manage to capture this here and then gone thing.

    • HI Olivia, thanks for your comments. I’ll look up the Compass Gallery show, it sounds interesting. I agree with your comments about poetry in that they often paint images in words that leave a strong impression. Prose too can leave you with a strong sense of feeling too though I suppose. None of it is easy to pin down, that’s the intrigue of it I guess.

  • Hi, Lisa, I love your drawings. They obviously come from a very precious place of memory and love for your Dad…and that certainly comes over to the viewer. The exhibition will be a special occasion.

  • Beautifully written Lisa, I can identify with so much of what you have said. I also lost a parent last year and am working on a series of paintings from images that captured some random moments over a period of 84 years. You “effortlessly collasp time, years, decades in to seconds as you write”, and you have conveyed this in your paintings as if you are painting music.

  • Hello, thanks everyone for your feedback. I hadn’t realised the comments had come up here, sorry not to get back sooner. I appreciate you all taking the time to leave your comments and it’s obviously very welcome to get such positive feedback especially when you feel a little bit vulnerable in terms of what you are trying to relay. I hope your work goes well too ‘ngorm’. Interesting to capture moments over a period of time too, including when people were much younger as a pose to how you last remembered them. Painting music, now that is something to aspire too! Lots to think about thankyou.

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