Memory is the seamstress

16 Jan-19 Jan 2025

Overview

Silkworm Collective present works conjuring imageries in which memory is uncertain, challenged, and abstracted into material and sculptural manipulations.

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

In this exhibition by Silkworm Collective, fluid and immersive works are presented throughout the gallery, alongside communal artworks that visitors have the opportunity to add to. These will be accompanied by a creative writing workshop, an embroidery workshop, and a perfumery workshop.

Memory, as Woolf denotes, is inconsistent. After long enough, memory can become myth, it can become legend. Memory can also be secret, known by only one or two bearers, and held by them. Only if it is spoken aloud and passed on can it survive. Memories rely on storytellers for their survival, and the artists in the exhibition know this. They intuitively weave their memories as stories, with words, with scent, with memorial, and as secrets. It is not for us to know which elements are embellished, which accounts are verbatim. Memories are but stories, and everybody knows the best stories are ever changing.