Kaycee Young

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

Hauntings of a Fragile Mind… Fragments of the Forgotten

This body of work delves into the photographic archive belonging to my grandmother, which acts as the material basis for what is unpacked conceptually. I am intrigued with the notion of ‘memory’ and its ephemeral nature. Specifically, I explore the fragility and unpredictable nature of memory loss that I have observed within myself and my family through a visual narrative.

I delve into dementia, PTSD and grief - some themes appearing more visually prominent while others become more of a personal experience in the making process. I watched my grandmother deteriorate with dementia, experienced the small moments of clarity in-between the voids of fragmentations as an onlooker without the full ability to understand what she could be going through. There are moments, within trauma and grief, that I can reflect in pairing with the similarities of memory loss, but the images I create and how I create them always feel different depending on what type of loss in memory I choose to think of. Whether it’s merely a shift or acting as a trigger, or entirely losing the reality of the memory to something false or fragmented.

The materiality of this project is what allows it to read the full effects of loss. I make use of expired photographic paper and damaged 1950’s film slides that belonged to my late grandmother. The slides hold a story of their own, having been discarded after my grandmothers’ death by my aunt in a state of coping with grief. They hold the damages of age and the effects of the elements that they suffered. All of which retains and reflects memory both physically as well as visually, once exposed onto paper. These elements provide a lack of control that reveals the unpredictability of what stays and what goes - both in memory and the physical nature of the paper.

There are methods of repetition, shifts in narrative, as well as ambiguous fragmentations that occur both in the recreating of the ‘memories’ through exposures and through the act of physically building the images after the darkroom process.

The presentation acts as passages of memory, concealing the work as a singular display but rather recreating the act of discovery, being forced to take time to experience the memories and to fully understand the immersive notion of repeatedly trying to remember things as a whole, yet being denied. The space the viewer enters is something that engulfs and holds intricate information - both understood and ambiguous - that is gradually revealed through time.