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MEMORIA

TECHNICA

The Nunnery, London Thursday 1 March Sunday 4 March 2012

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Gallery 1 1.Anon Untitled, 2012 2. Ruben Hale Placeholders, 2012 Laser engraved steel oak, 9 pieces (continues through Gallery 2 &3) 3. Judith Hayes Traces, 2012 i. 9x photo mounted on aluminium ii. 1 vitrine with 18 objects contained within 4. Catherine Linton Emet / Met I, 2012 Cot and mixed media 5. Gilly Pawson Portrait of Her, 2012 Sound, 2 mins, looped 6. Lucy Pereira Untitled, 2012 8x Pencil and red pen drawings on tracing paper 7. Philip Elbourne Second Leg, 2012 Oil on canvas 8. Georgia Pozotou Within Transparency, 2012 Silicone, PVA, glue and water 9. Chris Cawkwell The Real Thing, 2012 Transfer QR on Coke and assorted wine bottles

10. Michael Goberdhan Handle With Care, 2012 T-shirts and iron on labels Gallery 2 11. Catherine Linton Emet / Met II, 2012 Chest, jar and mixed media 12. Charlotte Marriot In Memory, 2012 Scratched tiles 13. Sophie Derrick Untitled, 2012 Painted taxidermy birds in wooden box 14. Ah Ra Cho For the Void, 2012 Live performance, silk and incense 15. Terrence Brett May 1971 Camber Sands November 2011, 2012 Photographic prints Gallery 3 16. Liuhao Zou Untitled, 2012 Oil on canvas series 17. Giorgio Garippa Removing the Crust, 2012 Video projection

18. Angelika Steiger Inside I & Inside II, 2012 Light-tape, acrylic and pigments 19. Matt Gee Mother of Pearl Remix & Velvet Strokes, 2012 Mixed media 20. Tim Barnes The Breath of Empty Space, 2012 Kinetic sound sculpture 21. Philip Elbourne First Leg, 2012 Oil on canvas 22. Mark Sibley This Transient Life, 2010 Oil on canvas 23. Claire Manning Rift 1 - 5 Collage, paper 24. Mark Sibley Mr Greenblat b- 1915, 2010 Oil on canvas 25. Sharon McElroy Motorcycle Hoodlum II, 2012 Audio installation 26. Michael Goberdhan Cross the Line Mixed media beads 27. Sophie Derrick Untitled, 2012 Painted taxidermy fox

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MEMORIA TECHNICA An Introduction by Christina Millare Featuring the works of MA Fine Artists from Wimbledon College of Art, Memoria Technica focuses on the use of primary memory and nostalgia instigated by the works within the exhibition. The artists works are envisaged as manifestations of the individual (artists) memory, deciphered and understood within the spectators understanding of shared experience and cognitive recognition. The space (The Nunnery) thereby becomes an accomplice in creating an environment that encourages a reinterpretation of the visual experience and the every day aesthetic. Both elements (the artworks and gallery space) act as distinct components of the memoria technica, an overarching apparatus that encourages active reminiscence. The curatorial process for Memoria Technica emerged out of my initial drive to go against the almost unfeeling, strictly mechanical process of showcasing work by an institutive body of emerging artists within the realms of showcase or degree show. The usual process of filling a blank space with art works, accentuated by the names of the makers in a market style was of no interest in what I felt should highlight the individuality of each member of the MA group as a whole. The student artist should not be envisaged merely as a student at a formative juncture but also as an artist with a current voice and as one who must be treated with the same respect as one would treat a more established practitioner. Within the network of the MA Fine Art institution at Wimbledon College of Art creative development is a shared focal point and from this links between the wholly individual artist emerge - the aim of an overall greater understanding of ones practice and how ones individual form of seeing/ understanding the everyday will in future become a cemented element of the contemporary art narrative. The exhibitions structure began with all 60 of the artists from the MA Fine Art course split in an unceremonious and unbiased arbitrary fashion. Although autocratic, the split was as organic as it was direct and not without meaning. The method of selection allowed for an absolute clean start to the curatorial process with artist and curator beginning on level ground. However, this is where the arbitrary link ends
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This is an exhibition borne out of a constant travelling of ideas and conversations in transit, which together create an eloquent whole exhibition formed within one unmovable site (The Nunnery) in mind. It is these very conversations face to face, on the phone and over email with the artists involved that manifest as a final curatorial concept. In short, Memoria Technica has emerged out of a collaborative process. It has been through these conversational opportunities that the common nostalgic thread made itself known. The fragile, subtle memoric capability in the works highlighted a cohesive element of play. And the layout of the space is the final form of processive play like pieces of a common puzzle each artwork corresponds with the other to form an exhibitive presence. Curated also over a number of studio visits to the MA Fine Art studios in London via Manchester (where I am currently based), on a personal level I have felt neither physically here nor there. The exhibition has then in this sense travelled with me up and down the breadth of England. I have taken Memoria Technica to work with me, on the train, on the bus and on some occasions to the bar- for the past couple of months the exhibition has been my constant, a grounding symbol of placement and now it is finally laid to rest at The Nunnery. Gallery 1: Beginning in Gallery 1, Ruben Hales Placeholders (2012) highlight the artists observations and sense of time and place. Recording his observations at a London location Hales engraved plaques evoke a sense of both occasion and remembrance. In Judith Hayes Traces (2012) stark lighting cuts through the polished rectangular vitrine encasing a collection of re-imagined tools of domesticity. Displayed above are over exposed photographs of dust objects that bruise the cold aluminum on which they are printed offering a somewhat translucent eye on the supposed solid structure of nuclear family living. Engulfing the room like air is Gilly Pawsons sound work, Portraits of Her (2012), a piecing together of motherhood uncovering the self-placement (and it could also be argued preservation) of the woman within this finite role. There is a choral nature in the hushed yet passionate tones in which the interviewed women speak as they question the Mother as a role of almost saintly stature. Leading on from Pawsons sound work we are in an assumed state of grace as suddenly ones eye travels across curious and beautifully monstrous Catherine Linton ephemera featuring a bird
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baby gro, a pickled textile fetus and an ornate hooped skirt woven with hair in Emet/ Met I (2012) in Gallery 1 and Emet/Met II (2012) in Gallery 2. Linton highlights elements of female-hood and traces a social memory that is inherently pre-ordained and pre packaged within the female biological structure. These elements are questioned and in the drama of its display turned askew on its curiously artifactual head. The curious in the everyday is explored in Philip Elbournes First leg (2012) in Gallery 2 and Second Leg (2012) in Gallery 1, which depict a discarded animals leg placed nonchalantly on top of a wooden post. The discovery of such a structure within tranquil countryside surroundings instigates an imagining of ritualistic sacrifices juxtaposed against the reality of violence inherent within the beauty of nature. The violence of nature takes a diseased turn in Lucy Pereiras delicate drawings on tracing paper as blood red lines infest the disembodied limbs of unknown subjects. The intricate red ink coils burst from colourless flesh like live parasitic matter invading its host. Dividing the gallery is Georgia Pozotous Within Transparency (2012) where silicone, PVA and water merge to create a tactile blanket of oozing lace that exudes a subtle sense of strength in its apparent fragility. A sense of social fragility is highlighted within the robust cotton structure of the everyday t-shirt in Michael Goberdhans Handle With Care (2012) series. Social labels are hung to dry as Goberdhan urges the spectator to take a closer look and unveil the labels hidden within each generic t-shirt. In Chris Cawkwells The Real Thing (2012), Coke bottles lined in regimental fashion encourage the spectator to look beyond the uniformed notion of the consumerist mind set. By inviting you to scan the QR codes transferred on each bottled object Cawkwell wants his viewers to explore his rethinking of consumerist symbolism further. Gallery 2: Journeying from the glaring tone of Gallery 1 into the subdued, silent surroundings of Gallery 2, Charlotte Marriots In Memory (2012) features shadowed tiles, scratched to reveal the artists visual memory of close family members. Lit as though in vigil, a singular tea light frames each impression. Sophie Derricks painted taxidermy animals (Gallery 2 and 3) rethink the assumption of a flat canvas as a painters domain. By painting directly onto what was once living
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the artist reanimates the static and dead and also pays homage to the traditional sense of painting technique by incorporating the physical nature of the canvas within the structure of sculpture. In Ah Ra Chos For the Void (2012), the artist displays a continually evolving work that is installed and performed in keeping with the context in which it is exhibited. The artist navigates herself through layers of silk fabric that drape the arches of The Nunnery in purple waves. Burning incense and instinctively burning holes into the cloth the artist uses both smell and sight to chart her presence within the gallery. In Terrence Bretts May 1971 Camber Sands November 2011 (2012) the artist revisits an altered Camber Sands, one that is starkly different to the one embedded in his nostalgic understanding of the resort as a school trip location. Revisited at night, the vivid illumines of a lonely lamppost become a peripheral guide marking the artists movement around the desolate surroundings. Gallery 3: In Gallery 3, the travelling of light leads the spectator to a space that when emerging from darkness appears to be a wash with vibrant colour. In Giorgio Garippas video performance, Removing the Crust (2012) the artist painstakingly licks the walls of The Nunnery, sketching the geography of the space. In his actions the artist captures memory in its rawest form, the dust and the fibres of those who were present in the past. By leaving traces of his saliva on the wall Garippa returns to The Nunnery an essence of his biology, he becomes both an element of the primary present and the futures past as his saliva forms an extra layer of the physical future memory of the space. In keeping with this notion of the recreation of memory Liuhao Zous Untitled (2012), sees the artist restructuring group photographs. Created out of a number of individual canvases, the artist then divides and pieces together in jigsaw fashion his personal preference of the group aesthetic. In Claire Mannings Rift series (2012) Victorian female photographic portraits are pasted in unison with modern female representations. As a series each collage becomes a singular frame of a whole movement as the image portrayed within the photo collages appear to gradually turn away from the viewer. In contrast to the feminine gaze are the solid masculine monochromatic tendencies in Matt Gees Mother
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of Pearl Remix and Velvet Strokes (both 2012). This sense of masculine structure is offset by a somewhat delicate lightness in the artists inclusion of shell like materials, mirrors and fluid latex. The textural nature of Gees work converses with Angelika Stiegers velvety blues and purples in Inside I and Inside II (both 2012) which are juxtaposed against violent speckled reds that heighten a sense of internal turmoil. A belly of fire it seems is quelled by the equally turbulent vivid darkness of the blues and pigmented blacks dissected by neon coloured lights, which heighten the paintings threedimensional capabilities. Sound becomes a point of focus in the nostalgia of youth culture in Sharon McElroys Motorcycle Hoodlum II in which a vicar reminisces his days as a rocker. Checked vinyl, leather and studs highlight the vivacity of memory whilst the monochromatic colour scheme symbolises cleric and biker uniformity highlighting unabashed youth set in contrast against the mechanics of structured adulthood. In Mark Sibleys This Transient Life (2010) and Mr Greenblat b- 1915 (2010), the artist paints in obsessive circular motion. Via this constant motion a sense of the unchangeable - an aging and deterioration of memory are brought to the fore. The detailed circular strokes in Sibleys paintings in a sense aim to go against this biological grain as well as highlight them in his subjects. In Tim Barnes slowly deteriorating kinetic sculpture, The Breath of Empty Space (2012), a bell resounds within the acoustics of the gallery, tolling at an apparent constant. Over the course of the exhibition the sculpture slowly deteriorates becoming both a symbol of the beginning and the end. In a sense Barnes sculpture acts as an hourglass, whereby through its apparent constant the structure of time within the context of the galley space is measured.

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On the following pages a selection of artists, curators and writers share their reimagining of Memoria Technica
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Taneesha Ahmed is an artist and curator based in Manchester. She is currently doing her MA in Curating at Chelsea School of Art and Design and has been newly appointed the curator in residence at Rogue Artists Studios with her collaborative partner Annie Carpenter. FORGETTING NOSTALGIA By Taneesha Ahmed
They took all the trees Put 'em in a tree museum And they charged the people A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone They paved paradise And put up a parking lot

-Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

We are now living in an age where we are constantly predetermining the conditions of our own nostalgia, as we are perpetually preserving our collective memories. Not only do we document our living experiences, we are finding virtual spaces to store these immaterial records. Needless to say, recent technological advances have given us the tools to master such a task and the majority of us can do so with relative ease. The stage of premeditation is slowly being eroded out of the act of preservation; to put simply we are in a state of auto- archiving. An example of how the conscious act of recording ideas has metamorphosed to become an automatic archival procedure would be perfectly illustrated with the digital library of facebook statuses and tweets. This is not to say that the actions on social media sites are not contrived as users are often aware of their own interventions into the public realm, but the method of documenting a thought
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and giving it a platform, has become seamless. It seems we are relentlessly curating the museum of ourselves immaterially and almost daily. The motivations to do so are perhaps subconsciously entwined with narcissism and legacy, as well as nostalgia. In Of Other Spaces Michel Foucault states that the obsession of the nineteenth century washistory: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever accumulating past and it feels as if we are still in the midst of this. (Foucault, 1986, p.22)
the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. (Foucault, 1986, p.26)

This proliferation of Internet usage and auto-archival behavior in turn is creating an excess of information in the public sphere. We are now being inundated with various forms of user-generated content where the consumer can create a stage to demonstrate to the virtual sphere, that they do exist in order to create a legacy.
This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world- a problem that is certainly quite importantwhat type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites. (Foucault, 1986, p. 23)

The Internet is could be determined as extension of our living space but we assume that it is another form of Memoria Technica a mnemonic device or aidememoire, a machine or system for aiding memory. Memoria Technica, in its original iteration, is memory system is based on formula of creating signs and transforming them into another forms the foundations of another semiotic visual language. The more relevant question is what is the purpose of such an aid? To be able to record memory or find a way of retrieving memory will always be a psychoanalytical fascination, and if we take a Freudian reading of memory and loss we can assume that perhaps there are somethings worth forgetting. In his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud illustrates his theories with amusing anecdotes of instances when
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forgetting is a subconscious act of aversion.

Perhaps we find forgetfulness more of a riddle than memory today that something we thought long forgotten can suddenly surface in memory again. (Freud, 1901, p. 129)

In consideration of the term selective memory used to define occasions where people have temporary bouts of amnesia, we should alternate the process and re-evaluate it on the terms of selective forgetting; in that we make a choice based on the information we do not want to remember which allows us to legitimately state that we have no recollection. Johnathon Sterne in the text The Preservation Paradox in Digital Audio writes about the current problems surrounding archiving sound, however these challenges are not necessarily medium-specific. Thematic concerns in the text are loss, paradoxical element of saving sound artifacts, as well as the historians role in preservation.
Perhaps it is historians special way of shaking a fist at the image of their own mortality, but every generation must lament that its artifacts, its milieu, will largely be lost to history. (Sterne, 2009, p.55)

Sterne appreciates that because of recording sound exists in the memories of machines and surfaces as well as the memories of people but is still aware that digital recording formats are less aides-memoir than aides-oubliez. (Sterne, 2009, pp. 57- 62). When dealing with the proliferation of cultural objects, Sterne argues that forgetting is an integral part of archival process as it takes into account its own context, its own narrative.
forgetting is also an important part of living. It is perhaps too much to say that historians ought to be happy about forgetting, but in order to do their work, and in order for archives to make sense, in order for a document like a recording to have any historical value, a great deal of forgetting must happen first. Forgetting is both personal and collective. (Sterne, 2009, p. 57)

Joni Mitchell words you don't know what you've got till it's gone reverberate strongly within the context of nostalgia and memory. However this is the paradoxical nature of preservation that illustrates Sternes argument. You can only fully comprehend loss at the moment you have lost something, up until then there is no point in pre-empting

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the gravity of the situation when you have not yet experienced it. We need to learn how to forget about nostalgia. Bibliography & References Sterne, J. (2009) The Preservation Paradox in Digital Audio. In: Bijsterveld, K. & Van Dijck, J. (2009) Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Foucault, M. & Miskowiec, J. (1986) Of Other Spaces, The John Hopkins University Press, Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 22-27, Available from: <http://www.jstor.org/stable/464648> [Accessed 20 February 2012] Freud, S. (2002) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, London: Penguin

Sacha Waldron is currently The Royal College of Art Curatorial Fellow at Arnolfini, Bristol. She writes a bit, draws a bit and likes to go to the cinema.
AIRLINE PILOT By Sacha Waldron When I was eight years old I would tell my friends that my father was an airline pilot. This was not true. Im not sure what my father really did then or know what he does now. He was constantly re-inventing himself. I remember him describing himself, generally, as a business man - his business cards always said Chief Executive, Director or Managing Director. They would have said this regardless of whether it was fifty people in the company or just my father alone. His fortunes would go up and down drastically... Once, I remember, he paid for me to fly from Liverpool to visit him in London where he had just moved into a new house. It had an enormous indoor swimming pool with a mosaic of a blue and green mermaid on the bottom. His young children had a live-in nanny and both he and his wife drove different coloured sports cars. A few months later my mother paid my bus fare to visit him at his tiny flat, the nanny had gone, my fathers spirits were low. Some time later the flat had been replaced with a large American style camper van. We ate Chinese take-away from paper plates that he tried to wash so we could use them again for the next meal. It was
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hard to keep up. Far easier and simpler to lie when i was asked by friends at my new primary school.. what does your father do?...their reaction to my fictionalisation was far more rewarding than it would have been had i replied..um...Im not really sure. My lie had pre-Easyjet glamour. My story had grounding in truth, tenuously at least. My father had, once or twice, taken a flying lesson. Im not sure whether it had been a gift, one of those experience presents where you get to drive a Formula 1 racing car or eat dinner on the Orient Express. Perhaps it was just one of his whims. I can imagine him dreaming of one day owning his own little jet, the flasher equivalent of the cherry red sports car he would drive about. He, also, always seemed to be in the air. Living between Karachi and London he would often call me from the airport. Hello, how are you? I cant talk now, Im just about to get on the plane.

I began to tell the story of my father, the airline pilot, so frequently as a child that I find it difficult to separate truth from fiction in my memories of the man today. I can see him quite clearly in a navy blue uniform and hat (he did like blue suits but never wore a hat), not quite as squeaky clean cut as his colleagues, slightly rougish (he had a thick bushy moustache and slightly oiled greasy black hair). Shirt sleeves rolled up drinking whiskey (i think he may have preferred Gin) and looking at girls in hot vaguely WW2 exotically locationed bars...Buenos Aires, Seville, Istanbul...Graham Greene places (In reality it was Pakistan, India, Dubai). I feed and encourage this pure romanticism as an adult, morsels of information and imagination from books, films and trips drip drip into false memory. Marguerite Duras The Sea Wall brought my father to 1930s Indochina, blinking from the sun as he stepped off the plane. I sat once at a bar on the river banks of Pisa and expected him to walk past. He would have been fired from his fancy airline and started flying European short-hops. After Fight Club i had him accident inspecting across America, his waistband expanding rapidly as he comfort ate away the images of mangled car metal.

The more you conjure up visualisations of a situation or scenario you remember the more it is affirmed in your memory as a memory. A smell, a taste, a touch, a feeling of some kind, build to form a truth. Memory is constructed. Whether something has
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strictly happened to you or not, if you have memory of it can that memory ever be proved as totally false?. You can ask my father if he was ever an airline pilot and he would, of course, say no. My memories of this situation are harder to unpick. I have an understanding of them as invented or falsely constructed but experience them as any other with sound and image, facts and errors. I remember them, feel nostalgia for them and occasionally, automatically, re-iterate them when asked the question...So, what does your father do? When lies become stories that entangle themselves in your memory it is sometimes hard to remember which ones are lies, which truths and which ones caught up somewhere in between.

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Char Millare is an artist and musician based in the outskirts of London. She has a passion for travel and toy cameras.

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Gilly Pawson, artist, lives on a boat on the Thames with her husband and her big, black, woolly dog. Her work at the moment is focused on listening to womens voices speaking from the heart so we might glimpse something of the feminine presence of God. Currently her latest audio piece is featured in the exhibition Memoria Technica. MEMORIA TECHNICA By Gilly Pawson I cannot choose what I remember in future Of the here and now

Although I do try To engrave certain pictures By focusing gaze

Knowing these moments That I want to hold will pass Cannot be captured

Although I practise The art of remembering It may well not work

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My memory plays Tantalizing games with me Sometimes surprising

Sometimes unwanted Shocking and unasked for thoughts Can enter my mind

When what Im seeking Are those eternal moments Returned to the now

Catherine Linton is a London-based draughtswoman, printmaker and textile fine artist. Having gained an MA English Literature at Edinburgh University in 1998, she sustained her art practice alongside a career in public sector health and social care regulation, finally realising the dream by pursuing an MA Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art, a visual continuation of her literary masters which specialised in writing by women. See: http://catherinelintonartist.wordpress.com Follow: twitter.com/cathy_linty

MEMORY FOOD By Catherine Linton I am female, so a meal made from three courses: my conscious, subconscious and something in between, is a meal peppered with hormonal spice, dark and strong.
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My work demands to be fed with memory. It insists that I turn myself inside and out, to feel and feel again, in and under the skin of me. The work is hungry. I try to make a meal of me. I stir memory in a big pot; sweat me out, letting it all simmer. It is a bittersweet process, which begins with bringing my brains slowly to the boil. I dredge and sift the shallow swill of my mind, to translate, poach meaning from the monkey chatter. Skimming this broth brings forth some solid fatty cerebral matter, my Known Knowns. I try to baste these together as some kind of narrative, bound with an egg or woven together with threads. The meaty tissues and sinews of my body are still more resistant to offering up their share of my memories. They keep the Unknown Knowns, those innocent every day repetitions, minor strains and major uncelebrated pleasures of the flesh. I am strung out like a cello. Plucking my breast and rump elicits visceral notes and chords, which are familiar, to me. I resound with memory but only echoes. But these memories were felt in flesh and need fleshy instruments again to play true. There is no flesh on the bones of these echoes of memory and I am no butcher. I seek and harvest materials with a tactile physicality. Skin like, visceral, lived in, they might have a kinship to my flesh. They take a fingerprint like I do. Playing memory music, re-enacting through empathetic materials soothes. I can mimic the original vibration or pitch felt by flesh, but fabric is no meal and catches in my throat. Still hungry. I put the hunger to bed. In sleep my unconscious self will shift and twitch and wash up all manner of partially digested ruminations to feed off. All my Known Unknown memories doubtless keep me company and dance in the hollow space in my stomach. Awake, they and our dance are forgotten. My shoes are just a little more worn each night. The soles flap but tell no tales, and I am famished. I practice shutting off the monkey shatter, the Known Knowns. I make pliable my body to unlock the blocks and granthies that stuff up the Unknown Knowns in pockets and gristle. I get close enough to the knots to examine but not unpick them. I get refrains of the Known Unknowns from remembered dreams. I catch distant whiffs of Unknown Unknowns on the breeze as I look over my edge. I breathe in and out, but both elude me and are beyond grasping.
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I move away to take a lung full of clean air away from myself. I cleanse my palate. My work is still hungry for memories, and mine alone will never be enough and makes me sick from too much. I rifle the drawers and wardrobes of female archetypes and literary predecessors and try them on for size. I tread in their shoes along lines of perfection. I fall as they did. I am caged and corseted. I burst out, rupturing stitches, sampling their emancipation. How else can I inhabit their memories and taste them? I press the notes of their lives to form chords with mine. Somewhere in the major and minor scales there may be notes that others can hum, that resonate in their bodies too. My palimpsest of silenced voices now awake and filling me up with memory and experience. An empathetic sisterhood, they emerge in number from the yellowed wallpaper in a locked attic, and march from the wood where chaos reigns. I am a banquet, a smorgasbord of shared female memory through cycle upon cycle of gestation, birth, gynaecology, and mothering. Oh, but this feast memory is too rich. It escapes my pot and bubbles over. To devour all those woman and their memories whole is monstrous. But memory is so delicious. I go back and pick at it. Memory cannot be gobbled whole. I must control my urge to disgorge memory all at once. The subtle flavour of each will be lost. A single meal will not satisfy, as no two palates are the same. My work has many to feed, will be distasteful to many. Better to select morsels from the memory pot like a fondue or scatter a fragmentary banquet to be grazed upon with rests in between. Each person comes to dine in different states of fullness with a belly full of their own. My memories may not mix well. The best cooking techniques let the individual flavours sing. I must find a way to let each ingest as much as they wish. Each must be allowed to play with their food, get down from the table and return as they wish. I can only hope that my work stays with them, repeats on them a little as I belch forth digested memories, the fibres that catch in my throat with the threads that weave them together. Enough, my larder is empty, my meat hung. All is ripe. My curator is chef and sommelier tonight and must now control the menu and devise the method of feeding.

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Philip Elbourne is a London-based artist currently on the MA Fine Art course at Wimbledon College of Art. Two of his paintings can be seen in Memoria Technica. THE BURDEN, A CRUCIFIX AND CARROTS A SHORT TRAGICOMEDY IN THREE PARTS By Philip Elbourne Scene I: The Burden Jo: I used to get these bags of buttons for 50p off Chester market, and one time there was a little earring, a clip-on earring in one of the bags. It was like just a little piece of tat really Neil: (Interrupting) Pearly one wasnt it? Jo: Yeah it was like a pearly earring But it was kind of, something quite, like (she pauses to gather her thoughts) It didnt feel quite right throwing it away, but I never would have worn it, wouldnt have done anything with it, but I just it always used to just turn up. Like youd think youd left it at somebodys house, and then youd find it in your pocket again. And that would happen for like, 2 years. I just kept on like youd sit down and (she mocks sitting on a sharp object) ow whats that? And it was this earring in your pocket. We called it The Burden. And then I just forgot about it, thought it had vanished from the realm of my life. Then last year I was giving some buttons to Neils girlfriend, just scooped them out at random from my button box (mimes scooping action), not thinking about which ones I was putting in or whatever, and then I took them round. Then the next day, Neil came in and was like Oh, I think you put this in by mistake. (Dramatic pause, then, sinisterly.) It was The Burden! Neil: (Mock astonishment) Incredible Jo:
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It came back to haunt me. Again. I cant remember what we did with it.
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Neil: So you dont know where it is now? Jo: No. Its probably going to be in my sandwich.

Scene II: Crucifix Neil: I found this crucifix in my garage. There was a bit of glass on it originally and it had all been smashed off. So I asked my brother about it, because he was in this whole thing of smashing things. I asked him why he smashed it and he said, Because I hate God! I thought that was (he gives a small, nervous laugh) ok unnecessary anger there So I, put it in my pocket and, like you (gestures to Jo), I just forgot about it. Then it kept coming up places, like you kept finding it in unexpected places. I kept finding it in my pocket, you know, Id go into my pockets for a bit of money and it was oh yeah, its that crucifix But anyway, I moved up to Scotland, and one random day I was in the flat and we had a knock on the door. I thought that was really weird because we never got a knock on the door, so I was like, Oh, first knock on the door! And it was a cleaner, which was also weird because we dont have a cleaner in our flats, there was like a cleaning rota for everyone who lives in that block to clean the halls and the stairways and so on. And she handed me that crucifix and said, Is this yours? and I was like (wide-eyed, remembering his shock) yeahthanks. And then I never saw her before that, and I never saw her since. And it was really creepy, you know when you get that sort of chill up your spine? (He raises his shoulders as he says this.) Because I didnt know Jo: Like how did she know that it was yours? Youd never seen her

Neil: Yeah. And I never took it I never took it up to Scotland, I dont remember taking it up to Scotland. And I dont remember I dont know, sometimes things just follow you around, dont they? That was a really spooky experience.

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Scene III: Carrots Jo: (Biting into a raw carrot.) I cant believe Im eating carrots and Im wearing an orange dress. Neil: I used to have a sleeping bag that looked like a carrot. Jo: (Amused.) Really?

Neil: Yeah! It was orange, and it went into like a long triangle shape, like a carrot. We used to call it the carrot sleeping bag Jo: Was it all kind of ribbed, like rigid?

Neil: Yeah. It was so weird. I didnt like it, it was like Jo: (Interrupts) Why didnt you like it?

Neil: My dad It was my dads, he used it when he was in the scouts or something Jo: It sounds really nice.

Neil: He used to carry it round with him because it was dead easy to carry around because it was small and compact. But if me or Simon, my brother, had to sleep in it he was like (points his finger, sneeringly) Ha ha, youre sleeping in the carrot sleeping bag! (Short silence) Jo: I was once waxing lyrical about my sister to someone, like describing her in different ways, and for some reason I said shes like a tin of baby carrots. Just because it sounded a bit cute. Neil: I hate tin carrots. Jo: Well, thats my sisters name now, because ever since then its really stuck she wasnt even there, but now ever since even my parents now (holds her hand up to her ear as if on the phone) Is carrots in? Yeah, Ill go and get her. Neil: Do you know what tin carrots remind me of?
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Jo:

What?

Neil: Holidays in a caravan. Jo: Yeah!

Neil: Tin potatoes and tin carrots. Jo: Did you ever get to sleep in the carrot while you were on those holidays?

Neil: Ha, no they were holidays with my mum. That other one was with my dad. My mum and dad separated, divorced when I was like three or something. Jo: Really?

Neil: Yeah. (Solemn pause) CURTAIN

Dee Sada is a musician in Blue on Blue. The bands second EP , Vison Imaginary is out in May. MEMORIA TECHNICA By Dee Sada These hands that once drew blood now draw a flimsy outline of an imaginary cottage, Gently resting at the top of a sullen hill, Patiently waiting for leaves to weave their paths and form an insular trail. This is where I will be buried.

These hands question the will of this mind, I visited you once but I was too late, I arrived just in time to feel the final warmth from your body give it's last exhale, I clasped you till my palms hurt and remember always wanting to remember that
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feeling. Why didn't you take me with you?

Now my smile is frosted over and my eyes stare into black, I forget you but in an instant you come back and haunt me, I will never be rid of you as long as I have these hands. I close my eyes and they disappear

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