Gina Glover

“The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of our intellect, in some material objects (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.”

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Proust’s difficult and subtle book uses the small French cake, the madeleine, as a symbol of the past that arises unintentionally. Proust traces the contours of a passive subjectivity that accumulates our memories without us realizing it. Temporal Events, what I describe here as ‘assemblage sculptures’, have in some respects a similar function. The work forms part of Playgrounds of War, my four-decade project which investigates the discovered secrets and the action of the healing processes of time and memory, including the role of forgetfulness.

In making these objects I’ve attempted to connect the personal world of my garden to its former existence as part of a military site (supporting the WW2 resistance movement) from which many departed but did not return, and therefore taking the work and its connections far beyond my own personal subjectivity.  In so doing I have attempted to integrate two very contrasting realities and feelings into the same art object – joy and comfort in nature alongside fear of conflict and disorder.

For me it has been an exploratory process of creating and revealing objects incorporating different points within historical and physical space – or ‘events’, to use the term of philosopher Alfred Whitehead. All these objects constitute, in effect, both ‘works in progress’ and ‘works of process.’ They have offered to me the opportunity of making, remaking, pondering, assembling/reassembling, in such a way that recalls my former love of embroidery, but also, in the making, allowing me to communicate the felt experience of a disordered world through an undirected but nevertheless compelling creative process.

Through this work, I hope to embody the subjectivity of my own experience of time alongside those experiences of the others who went before in this once-special place in formerly deeply troubled times.