The Powerful Whispers Project: Contemporary Visual Art Practice

Powerful Whispers is a body of research resulting in an original fiber-based series of works that combine digital and haptic technologies in images and sound. The research critically analyses and responds to the personal archive of a box of family photographs documenting the Wilson family from the Victorian era to the 1980s. The research through critical practice explores memory, post-memory and the representation of post-memory using photographic archival materials and family narrative. The artworks question the concept of material in a discourse between material as fabric and material culture; the material of memory and archives of the past and their representation as temporal things, images and sounds. Critical analysis positions the debate within the field of post memory studies in making and culture, appropriating images and the sensual in fibre, in the exploration of the fragmentary and the half remembered in Deleuzian folds in time and space. The Powerful Whispers Project considers the remembered object and the remembered image of post-memory in relation to discourses on the phantasmagoria of memory, informed by Derrida’s ‘undeciderability’ of the archive and grounded in the phantasmagoria of the archival image in the literature on memory and post-memory as examined by Jo Spence, Annette Kuhn, Marianne Hirsch, Patricia Holland and Joan Gibbons.

The artefacts created during this critical practice were exhibited at the 12TH International Biennial of Contemporary Textile Art ‘SCYTHIA’, Ivana Frankivsk, Ukraine 29th May 2018 – 15th June 2018 and selected for the triennial exhibition ‘Textile Art of Today’ which toured Eastern Europe in 2018 – 19. The completed series of works were the focus of solo exhibitions at the Artifex Gallery, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Vilnius 2nd April to 20th April 2019 curated by Severija Incirauskaite-Krianeviciene and the Ivano-Frankivsk Contemporary Art Center from 10th September 2019 to 21st September 2019.