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23/10/2024
er and Chelsea.
Gavin Edmonds is an alumni of MA Fine Art: Drawing from UAL Wimbledon. During this session he talked about his PhD research about the Freudian concept of ‘afterwardness’, an experience that is either incomprehensible or traumatic, retained by memory unconsciously, revived with or without our consent.
He talked about how trauma erases memory and how trauma can be revisited through images. We don’t remember trauma in a narrative sense, but as fragments. The emotions and physical sensations, the imprints (including images) of trauma on the mind and brain continues to be experienced in the present, not as memories but as disruptive physical and emotional reactions.
The key point of Gavin’s subject is how PTSD is carried throughout the body. Through our talks and discussions, I started to think more about ‘how things are able to hold memory’. I started to think about how it would be justified to draw memories as separated fragments, stitched together as a collage.
I also had a chance to discuss my research with Gavin. Further discussions regarding memories led us to talk about dreams. Dreams, vulnerability, and memory are all interwoven through the connective seams of the subconcious. Andre Green talks about how dreams show shattered times and fragments from different time elements. We also talked about impermanence, and how memories of a traumatic event would wash away, yet the bodily response would often stay. This notion further inspired me to use calico: where the drawings that are drawn with colored pencils would eventually fade away through time, yet the creases made on the fabric will remain.
At this point, I was deciding the direction of my research, on how I am able to talk about vulnerability, dreams, and tactility as one. Ultimately, I came to the realization that I am the way I am now, and others are the way they are partly because of the trauma that we have been through. Something that I was aware of from Gavin’s lecture is how he didn’t show or tell us about his trauma, not that he shouldv’e as it’s Trauma is something held personally by a person, as Trauma is something that I don’t even feel comfortable showing on my works. What I appreciated from Gavin was the way he would instead show how his trauma makes him feel through metaphors, fragments, and images, which later influenced and inspired my art making.