The Influence of Materiality on Recollection & Memory

Flipping through my photo album, I am met by faces of the past. Each image holds one moment: a freeze-frame from days, months, and years ago. However, none of the images are a perfect reflection of the moment. Colours, lighting, angles, and scale are distorted, bringing into question the reality of the scene. Holding the image, feelings from the past arise, glazed over by a sense of nostalgia and biased preconceptions of my own memories. Faulty memory is supported by faulty records. 

While photography aims to produce a perfect visual recording of the past, other materials offer sensorial, tactile recollections of the feelings present at the time of their creation. Art offers the possibility to freeze a moment and share it with an audience, giving longevity to fleeting moments in time. Artists Cat Lipiec, Geneviève Bouthot, and Esther Cline Mongo Clarke explore the physical manifestations of memory through their practices. Physically interacting with smooth clay vessels, metal frames, and soft threads stitched over porcelain, their artworks recall a moment in the interconnected life and memory of the artist and material object. Much like the compilation of photos in my album, these artists are crafting vessels to house singular moments in time and tell stories of the past. Their artwork invites pause, reflection, and vulnerability. They carry and embody the changing states of materiality involved in ceramics, cyanotype, and sculpture and create a parallel between these transformative processes and remembering. They question: how are our memories recorded?  

Materiality plays a primary role in the outcome of these physical manifestations. In Geneviève Bouthot’s installation Cyclus (2024-2025), ceramic urns and vases are decorated in insects and placed below the ever-watching eye of a thrush. Scarab beetles are embroidered on the ceramic hard surface, and the songbird is portrayed over four circular plates that come together to form one whole image; a reflection on the way our memories are stored in bits and pieces, not fitting perfectly back together. The installation creates a tense atmosphere between the materials but also between the images, as the thrush might swoop down at any moment to pluck an embroidered insect from the vessels below. Wooden tables hold the collection of blue, white, and rust-coloured ceramic vases, each composed of curving, abstract bodies decorated with painted and stitched scarab beetles, that appear to run in continuous patterns across the ceramic surfaces, bound by unbreakable cycles. The interaction between the threads and the ceramic body of the vessels also plays into the cyclical themes of the installation. The threads are fated to decompose before the ceramics; however, the ceramic is fragile and could break before the threads wear thin.

The insects and birds appear through the natural process of cyanotype printings onto ceramics, which uses a chemical solution that reacts to UV rays to slowly develop the image of an object or negative placed in front of your surface, resulting in a distinctive blue and white print. Like the cyanotype, the process required to fire the pots is calculated and careful. Transforming soft clay into strong, durable pottery requires care to maintain their form and structure. 

The circular elements of the work meditate on cyclical patterns experienced by us, the materials, and the ecological environment. 

notes Geneviève. Despite the inevitable material transformations that abound in Cyclus, ultimately, “the materials, fired at low temperature in the cazette, are worked with care; nothing is lost.” i

Here, the artist is referring to both the memories contained by each vessel, but also the recycled source of her material. Part of her ceramics process involves rescuing discarded pieces of clay and reviving them for her projects. Instead of being forgotten after their intended use has lapsed, Geneviève extends their life cycle. While they have been transformed from their previous state, the ceramics still hold the memories of the past within the material. This cyclical process can help to articulate our feelings of loss and grief. People and experiences are still with us even when they are no longer physically present, through the traces that they leave behind. For Geneviève, memories are recorded through the tension between materials, their natural cycles, and reclamation. When we care for our memories, nothing is lost, no matter what transformations our bodies and minds experience. 

Cat Lipiec’s Crochet Series (2023-2024) suspends soft yarn sculptures in time through an experimental process whereby they become ceramics. The crochet’s form becomes immovable; a visual deception on the viewer which requires closer inspection. Crochet Series uses the inherently transformative process of firing ceramic porcelain in conjunction with fibre arts, resulting in a series of porcelain vases, jugs, and spheres that maintain the formal qualities of crochet. The individual stitches are visible through the slip cast of porcelain, with each row clearly defined, giving the objects a linear and cyclical quality. The pieces are curiously not glazed or painted but are left in the natural grey tone of the porcelain, drawing emphasis to the form of each piece. They maintain the holes and gaps of the crochet stitch, creating a distinct dispersal of light when a lightbulb is placed inside, and the suspended lamp shade illuminates the rest of the project below. 

Furthermore, Lipiec notes that the meticulous process has only a fifty percent success rate. The surviving results are “vessels themselves are subject to the same nature as memory; some are forgotten or blown to pieces”. ii The memory of the crochet form is hollow, empty, and missing the materiality that it identifies with, but still holding its essence and posture. The holes in the vases created by the crochet stitches also nullify the traditional use value associated with this type of ceramic object: these vases and jugs will never hold water, making them shells of what they could have been. Crochet could not hold water either; the material would soak it up, leaving it sopping wet and devoid of shape. Lipiec is challenging the material languages of clay and fibres, forcing them to confront a transformation that they refuse to forget, a new shape they never thought they could become. These vases are more than mere vessels; they are containers of memory. 

Esther Clarke’s Magenta (2024) brings forward the unique nature of individual memory in the form of mixed-media sculpture. At six-feet tall, this extravagant, otherworldly creature represents the power music holds over our experiences. While her body is made of a sturdy, metal frame, her face, arms, and ears are crafted from finely detailed rusty orange and blue terracotta, balancing the forceful with the delicate. 

Magenta’s form is indicative of her musical powers, with large, pointed ears perfectly designed for listening in on a melody. Music creates records of fleeting emotions and moments, capturing an experience that people may remember fondly, or with distaste. Clarke’s sculpture physically represents music's ability to hold and access our memories. She appears to be caught in a moment full of movement. One hand is raised to the sky, with the other stretched out behind her. Her face looks upwards, evoking a sense of powerful reverence for the music that she worships. From her head hang long, white, twisted locs of hair made from fabric, each ending with a decorated terracotta bead, representative of her Ugandan heritage. This flexible, unfixed, material juxtaposes the solid, metal frame of her body, further adding to the sense of movement.

Clarke uses music to explore themes of safeguarding memory and other intangible experiences, as sound is ephemeral and difficult to capture in physical form. Magenta’s right arm, held above her head, is echoed in four parts down her side. Gradually, the echoes become less explicit, dissolving into an abstract indication of the primary arm. This illustrates her expressive movement, furthering the impression that Magenta has been caught mid-dance. The limbs recall the formal qualities of long exposure photography, capturing multiple iterations of one movement in the same shot. “Referencing music’s special ability to take you back in time and make you feel exactly how you felt when you listened to it last,” iii Clarke's multimedia sculpture asks us to use music as a method of holding our memories, returning to melodies that bring us joy in times of strife. 

Memory is an elusive companion that leaves us chasing ways to pin down moments exactly as they appeared to us, inspiring each of these three artists to take up the task of recording memories in innovative ways. Bouthot’s Cyclus reminds us that transformation is cyclical and memories are recorded in every aspect of the cycle. Lipiec’s Crochet Series takes on the binding of soft, dissolvable material into one that is strong and sturdy, but not every sculpture survives, highlighting the spontaneity of memory. Clarke personifies memory through Magenta, who urges us to turn to the melodic and comfortable familiarity within our memory. Each artist finds power in these transformations. While we will never be able to hold on to every moment or remember every experience, we have the ability to be intentional in our decisions to document them. Through these artists, how we record memories becomes more than just a question of the physical vessels that carry them, but also the methods of love and care woven into every step of the process.