I think there’s a quiet comfort to be found in the way our memories fade over time. Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to find ways to interpret and record this wonderfully strange language of inaccuracies. Writing memories down seems to solidify them too much and strip them of some of their magic – so I’ve never really been one to keep a journal. But like most people, I fairly mindlessly save thousands of photos and screenshots in my phone. As I scroll back through them, each photo becomes a single frame in a much larger moving reel. A scattered and chaotic collection of fragments that, as a whole, provide a candid and sometimes confronting impression of a particular period of time. Photographs, other paintings, landscapes, portraits, nudes, details, corners of things, images sent from friends, internet detritus- the disarming honesty of an un-curated archive. These paintings are memory objects built out of those fragments. Hopefully unrecognizable but strangely familiar. Imagined still lifes of a not so still life.
Will Colenso, 2023
Image: What I knew about this feeling I knew before I met you 2023, acrylic on wooden panel, 60 x 60 cm.
