Brooding on Bornholm: Postmemory, Painting and Place

Abstract

I have a particular interest in the unresolved remainders of human activity in landscape. Through drawing and painting I search out traces of past lives that might not be immediately obvious. The images I make depict man-made structures in relation to landscape. In my drawings and paintings neither the chosen motif nor the landscape take precedence, the two are in dialogue. Indeed, David Crouch reminds us that that nowadays landscape is not usually considered to be simply ‘countryside’, but ‘it can also include broadly the assemblage of land-forms, concrete shapes … serendipitous collections of things. Implicitly included are our own bodies that are now enlivened into the ‘landscape’ (Crouch, 2010, p. 105). This view of landscape resonates with my concerns. Travelling to a particular place, making work on location and then developing this material back in my studio has always been a fundamental feature of my painting practice; however, the selected locations have changed considerably during the last few years. I have moved from making images generated by visits to the British coast to images triggered by continental resorts. As the twentieth century drew to a close and the events of that century were reflected upon, I came across a wave of cultural commentators considering the notion of transposition in relation to the children of Holocaust survivors: that is, the ways in which traumas that have been experienced by one generation might be transmitted to the next — a ‘second generation memory’ (Epstein, 1997; Hirsch, 1997; Hoffman, 2005; Karpf, 1997; Wardi, 1992).