EMBEDDED MEMORY
Embedded Memory
The Lytlewode Press | Melbourne
2016
ISBN 1905611900, 9781905611904
20 pages (single-sided concertina folded), 10 colour illustrations. Separate front and back boards with blocking to front board, slipcase bound in pink cloth. Edition of 25.
14.7 x 21.5 cm
15.5 x 22 cm in slipcase
The title Embedded Memory is a play on words, examining childhood memory and adult identity within the framework of the bedroom. By engaging with male and female adult subjects between the ages of 20-26, across several suburbs of Melbourne, this series explores the remnants of childhood in adulthood and the way in which the family home plays a role in adult identities.
Embedded Memory consists of eight portraits, each situated in the subject’s bedroom of their childhood or family home. Each portrait is an examination of the subject’s private space; the viewer is invited into each bedroom. Each subject has verbally related their feelings about their space and their relationship with their home, family, and childhood and what it means to be an adult living within the structure of the family home. These texts accompany each image respectively.
This series was born out of personal experience when I moved back into my family home after having lived out of home for two years. In my experience I noticed a stigma attached to living “at home” as an adult. I began to develop a complex about this issue and consequently considered the impact of adults living in their childhood bedrooms and how they regarded this in relation to their identity and sense-of-self. The series examines the interior and exterior complexities faced by each subject, for example, familial relationships, emotional connection to the home environment and connections to childhood.
The sequence of ten images has been printed with text opposite each image as a concertina-style book. This format allows the viewer to look at all images at once if the concertina is fully un-folded, or to focus on the individual portraits in a more conventional way, one page at a time.