From Generation To Generation

FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION: Inherited Memories and Contemporary Artwork with memories that are their own.

“Nostalgia (from the Greek, nòstos - homecoming, a Homeric word, and álgos - pain/longing). Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss a ‘fantasy’ or product of the imagination”.

Nostalgia is also ....’the expression of yearning for an earlier time or place or a significant person in one’s history, the memory and significance of which or whom contributes to the sense of self’.

On occasion, while rummaging through a dusty box of childhood memories locked deep within our brains, we will stumble upon a piece of nostalgia, which once remembered rips through our mind tearing open the locks of memories, that have been long captured and momentarily forgotten.

There are many forms of memory: memories of events we have experienced, memories we have heard as family stories and from popular culture, even memories of an imagined future.

From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memories and Contemporary Art Work with memories that are their own. They remember and recall stories that were never theirs and assemble them in a variety of media to be seen heard or even a subconscious memory. These artists are secondary witnesses to past events, they use in their work, and it is precisely this distance in time and space that allows them to offer powerful narratives, open to a wide range of interpretation and expression.
The exhibition is organised by themes suggested by the artwork themselves including personal narratives, social and cultural memory, and the (re) creation of memories based on fiction or dubious truths.

Through their work, the artists in this exhibition search, question and reflect on the representation of truths related to the ancestral and collective memory - ultimately attempting to make sense of their own past.

Memory as a wise writer once put it, is the thing we forget with. But poetry and contemporary art work of course, is bound up with the idea of remembering, recollecting, reflecting, memorialising.

Sharon O’Brien B.A. (Hons) M.A. Fine Art Director
The Wharf Gallery