Collective Memory Walk

Here are some people at the opening creating their own "Walk from Memory" to add to the collaborative piece, Collective Memory Walk.

The instructions I offered were: choose a ground and thread, retrace your most memorable walk in stitches.




opening photos taken by Reverend BLAMO

The idea behind the piece is to translate experience and thought into a tangible object / narrative. Through the mediation of the material, the stitched memories begin to look more like one another than the original territories or, specifically, the walk each person took through his/her territory.

As new visitors come to the show, the piece continues to grow. The overall effect looks a bit like Tibetan prayer flags.

9 Walks from Memory

Memory Walks
hand-dyed cotton yarn on raw canvas
2004
10" x 12"

Each of these small canvases are a stitched memory of different walks on the same route. The walks were a part of my and Frank's (my marriage partner's) nightly routine when we would stroll the same familiar route through the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Xs mark the beginning and ending points of each stroll, which physically began and ended at the same point but, in memory, never quite match up as they are re-walked / re-membered through stitches. Each memory is different in emphasis... what with how, in recollection, I might linger on some stretches of road a bit longer or shorter amount of time or accentuate the twists and turns of the streets at slightly different angles.

Sometimes the actual walks included an extra loop around a connecting street (depending on the evening and my and Franks's energy level or interest). This accounts for some of the stitched memories including an extra little loop in the stitching while others do not.

In doing this mapping project, I was drawing a connection between sequential, time-based activities (walking, stitching, remembering, narrating) and spatial, mapped imagery, which are usually static. I was also marking evidence of how repetition, reimagining or re-telling of a story, even in stitches, ingrains a pattern and molds the map (over time) into a more idealized (or nostalgic) form of the "original" territory while still allowing for idiosyncratic differences between each repetition.