Memory (2021)
Wood, fabric, cardboard, paper and clay
It’s been almost ten years since gran passed. She lived interstate, so I didn’t get to see her much. Most of my memories are of her apartment, resplendently decorated with all manner of knick knacks from nearly one hundred years of life. I only have two photos of her place, but I can see the rest in my mind. In Memory, I use the static world of the diorama as a means of preserving my memories of this place, and her. The diorama, left uncovered and subject to the elements, reflects the wearing down of my memories over time.
About the Artist
Kate Dunn lives on Gadigal Wangal Country in Sydney’s inner west. Their practice explores experimental sculpture, diorama, zine making and costume making. Graduating with a Master of Art from UNSW Art and Design in 2019, Kate has been focusing on the relationship between creation and destruction in their works, engaging in a process of creating dioramas and subsequently destroying them, exploring the beauty of disrepair. Kate has exhibited at Scratch Art Space, Gaffa Gallery, Chrissie Cotter Gallery and Kudos Gallery.
Transcription
My name is Kate Dunn. so I'm a Sydney based artist predominantly working in diorama and zine making. So my work is a Diorama and it's intended to be ephemeral.
So I wanted to break down in the elements over the course of the exhibition. So to achieve that I use materials that I think will be more likely to break down if it rains, for examples. So I made a lot of the furniture out of cardboard. The wallpaper is just paper. I used watercolor paints for everything. So it's yeah, going to change throughout the exhibition, which I'm really excited for because it's like a part of the creation of the work is out of my control, which I think is really interesting. And the work itself is a reconstruction of my late Grandma's house. I only had one photo of her house and then the rest was just my memories, and she had this really beautiful house.
It's pretty much exactly the same as the diorama, just super overdecorated and it just was very dated as well. There was all these items that looked like they were from the nineteen forties, for example. Um, so I just have really strong memories of just visiting her house when I was a child. And Yeah, my work reflects the impact of place and how that affects our memories of people, people who we've lost in particular, and I wanted to explore memory itself. So your memory has become unreliable over time and they start to get less clear. So, the destruction of the work to me, I think, reflects how memories kind of break down and get more washed out over years.
Creating this meticulous work and it's, yeah, in this precious box and it took a long time. I think we try really hard to protect the memories that we have, but you know, each year we're getting older and older and we're getting more new memories all the time. So you kind of try and put your memories in a box and protect them, but there's always going to be, you know, other things coming into your brain that kind of break your memories down a little bit over time. So you're like trying to protect them, but life prevents you from totally doing that.
The physical traces of people who are who leave us behind. So, yeah, you know, when a person passes away they have a whole house full of things and there are a lot of memories attached to that. And Yeah, just reflecting on these precious items and how they make you feel and, I think just the impact of memory and how it makes up our identity as well and just continues to shape our lives moving forward.