Memory, Have You Hidden Here (6) (Richard Skelton)

- Forms of Things Lost To (signed original artwork)
- And Then Gone (fragment from the exhumed book)
- Forms of Things Lost To (booklet)
- Here, in this Museum of the Forgotten (booklet)
- This Exaltation of Memory (booklet)

*

 

Memory, Have You Hidden Here is a special edition comprising a series of artworks, Forms of Things Lost To, and two booklets, This Exaltation of Memory, and Here, in this Museum of the Forgotten.

 

The overall title comes from a line in the novella, And Then Gone – a line that seems to ascribe extra-human agency to the facility of memory itself: ‘Memory, have you hidden here, all this time, waiting for my return?’ In the book, various kinds of interments and exhumations are performed by both seen and unseen hands, and as the narrative progresses there is an overlapping and obscuring of earthly and psychological terrains. Thought processes take on fluvial or terrestrial qualities, and the land itself appears alive with the trauma of its own memories.

In the late summer of 2022, a copy of And Then Gone was buried in waterlogged soil for about 3 months before being exhumed. During this interment, pages of the book became fused and overwritten. Forms of Things Lost To presents salvaged fragments from the recovered text alongside a series of eight artworks that were painted, partially erased and repainted over the same period of time.

 

Just as And Then Gone narrates the recovery of buried memories, This Exaltation of Memory foregrounds a phenomena known as hypermnesia, in which ‘apparently obliterated’ memories are revived. The booklet enacts the process of loss and recovery using experimental printing techniques and non-porous, semi-transparent papers. The ink cannot adhere and becomes smudged and illegible, yet the clarity of the original letterforms is still partially visible, becoming more so with each turn of the page.

 

Here, in this Museum of the Forgotten pairs fragments from And Then Gone with photography from the borderlands of Cumbria not far from Scaleby Moss, where a bog body was discovered in 1845. The booklet opens with the question, ‘Have I not always been here?’, which is followed by images featuring so-called ‘witches’ brooms’ – knots of excessive growth that are particularly prevalent in birch trees. The ‘here’ of the question therefore hovers around a specific but undefinable locus, and, in this new context, the narrative voice itself becomes unknowable. Is it the nameless protagonist of And Then Gone, or is it memory itself, caught in the trees’ branches like so many witches’ brooms?