Meadowmill 2011

Notes on Memory

There are times when the life of the past seems very close – almost as if it might be around the next corner. The closeness of the past is embodied in the closeness of the walls and ways around you.[1]

Living at the top of a Victorian tenement, and working in a former Jute Mill in the old Industrial area of Dundee - still made up of narrow cobbled lanes, massive loading bays and storage warehouses – artist Helen Angell-Preece is made aware daily of the city’s history and of the previous inhabitant’s stories over-layed onto the walls and buildings and stones she now walks.

How would it look if our own personal thoughts and memories of family, friends or lover - surely similar universal concerns experienced by previous residents - were made visible on the buildings and walls that surround us?

As a possible answer the artist has printed and displayed these thoughts - temporary, moveable, changing daily, then forgotten - like Daily Headlines exhibited in Newspaper Billboards, and photographed them against the permanency of the built environment.

She hopes this juxtaposition – the softness of the emotion against the density of stone and wall, and the contrast of the personal thought printed in such a Public manner – opens up a small space, a beat of time, a memory for the viewer.

[1] Ackroyd, Peter. 2010. VENICE, Pure City. London: Vintage Books. P106