Personal Histories

The exhibition is curated by Robyn Foster. She writes: 'Personal Histories started when 30 long forgotten photos were discovered in my brother's attic. They belonged to previous owners of the house and had lost their identity. I was custodian of these century old photos until one of their ancestors found me (via internet) and reclaimed them. I got to thinking about the various differences and similarities of people's experiences.' My work , Shadow Book, is included in this group exhibition in two parts (first exhibition Oct/Nov 2014 at Redland Museum and second exhibition April/May 2015 at Redland Art Gallery) in Cleveland, Queensland, Australia.

Shadow Book takes the form of an atlas or travelogue in which personal and subjective experience often breaks through. Shadow Book was based on notebooks and drawings made during a period of time in Venice when the isolation and sense of dislocation I felt as I wandered in that unreal city made it increasingly difficult to separate fictional and autobiographical memory. The broken prose constantly loses its foothold in the present and although the book is interspersed with maps and diagrams, the journey moves unconventionally through time and space. The gathering of semi-autobiographical material with drawings, photographs and research notes becomes an associative work in which fiction confession and recovered memory remain forever entangled.

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