Courteney Hope Webb

Virtual Exhibition

Group Catalogue Site

WE ARE BUT VESSELS…*

“Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” They are part of us. We are part of a tradition.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Ryan Holiday

My work stems from a desire to explore my family’s collective memory, in an attempt to construct an understanding of my own personal and familial identity. The intention with this body of work is to investigate ideas of past happenings and environments, and their impact on the lives of my family, as well as the life I live now.

The aim of this project is to work with the concept of constructed memory and, further, with constructed identity. My imagery includes archival family photographs, retrieved from both my parents’ childhoods and my own, in an effort to capture a story that is simultaneously about past understanding of memory as well as about present understanding. For years, these archives have existed in such different states. Some are visually rich and dense, and others are empty of detail or information.

When looking at such an archive, a sense of nostalgia is experienced. These feelings are not smooth, though. They are not straight-forward, but are instead scratchy, itchy, distorted. They sit askew and feel out of place. This nostalgia is not mine, yet I feel so connected to it. It belongs to me through photographs, stories, through a passed-down narrative, passed-down memories. These memories exist and don’t at the same time.

The images I use connect with each other in an explosive way. Through the construction of a timeline of sorts, one not exactly linear, the impressions of it influence and interact with each other, much like memory and experience do. Cut-outs, tracing, overlaps and erasure form the greater part of my methodology, functioning in a way that highlights scenes of familiarity and obscures moments of confidentiality.

The family story is one that is by nature both hidden and exposed, vulnerable and yet hard to look at directly. It is one that is alluded to in conversation but very rarely tackled head-on. This is also referenced in my work. Hard to look at and focus on, my body of works pieces together memory that by its nature cannot possibly exist as a whole.

*…if not for our memories* completes the title of my work, for what are we if not a combination of recollections?