Doris Hainsworth nee Wilson: Memorybox

Doris Hainsworth Nee Wilson (2017) is an original artwork integrating found object, cutting-edge digital technologies and fibre manipulation. The work is part of a body of creative practice resulting from critical and analytical research into a personal photographic archive of the Wilson family from the Victorian era to the 1980s. Anthropological research and oral narrative examined family remembrances and explored how memory and post-memory held within the photographic archive form feelings of belonging and construct social relations. Theories of material culture and memory studies ground the object/ image relationship in an active production of meanings which is always discursive and textual with their own formal conventions in common with poetry and metaphor.

In an original interplay between objects and images of the past and contemporary digital image making technologies the artwork evokes emotive objects of memory that speak of “silence, absence and contradiction” as much as authenticity. Research as critical practice has shown how the “performative nature of remembering”, through the stories revealed by objects and images of the past, heals past hurts and may also be transformative in informing how individuals and communities live in and relate to the present and the future (Kuhn 2002, p.158 ). The viewer engages with the materiality of the object or the image as a sign pointing into the past as present. The artwork was first exhibited in the Chasing Ghosts 2 themed show in the Verum Ultimatum gallery in Portland Oregan USA from 2nd December 2017 to 16th January 2018. This work was subsequently also selected by the juried exhibition committee for the International Textile Art Biennial held in ‘Den Breughel’ Haacht, March 23rd to 31st 2019.


The artwork Doris Hainsworth Nee Wilson evokes a presence in absence of fragile otherness. In mixed media it unifies signifiers in a found object, the vintage glove, and cotton fibres treated with glue starch that are dye sublimation printed with a cropped and blown up portrait image. In the way that the print effects the web of fibres and the form of the glove the glove and image occasionally disappear and reappear. The viewer engages with the materiality of the object or the image as a sign pointing into the past as present. The artwork was first exhibited in the Chasing Ghosts 2 themed show in the Verum Ultimatum gallery in Portland Oregan USA from 2nd December 2017 to 16th January 2018. This work was subsequently also selected by the juried exhibition committee for the International Textile Art Biennial held in ‘Den Breughel’ Haacht, March 23rd to 31st 2019.