Alice Blue Gown

The artwork Alice Blue Gown creates in object, imagery and sound a discourse on the nature of memory and the past. The infants dress creates a ghostly metaphor with the past which bridges that space between knowledge and the aesthetic in the real object as experiencing attains a grasp of the features of a sensual object before us. Aesthetics and knowledge create a dialogue between real objects and real qualities. Time, to become visible, 'seeks bodies and everywhere encounters them, seizes them to cast its magic lantern upon them" (Deleuze 2008, p.13). In this space the archive becomes spectral; haunted by that which is excluded. To Derrida this haunting is "a trace always referring to another whose eyes cannot be met; a ghostly presence, oppressed by the ever-expanding weight of the past" (Coverley 2020, p.86). In remaking myths through narrative objects the artwork Alice Blue Gown captures the fragility of the past in a metanarrative that arises through imagination and the representation of memory text within a fragile cloth that begins to frame the ‘uncanny’ which, as Freud stated in his essay of 1919 is that which is familiar, but where something lies beyond it that cannot be reconciled with the familiar or the homely; the conjoining of two things or more that are familiar but which do not belong together (Freud 2003, Fisher 2016). The artwork was selected for the 14th International Biennial of Contemporary Textile Art Scythia 22 held in Ivano Franisvk Ukraine 1st - 15th June 2022