"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting". For Kundera, remembering and preserving memory on both a societal and individual level becomes a form of resistance against an erasure and loss of identity and freedom.

We choose to work with bronze as a sculptural material because of its permanence; its resistance to death. Similarly, we build houses, homes, so they will be those stable foundations amid persistent change. The reality however, is impermanence. What happens to the things contained when a house is demolished, the hydrangeas uprooted?

a heterotopia full of hydrangeas in perpetual bloom subverts the strength of bronze by building ornamental fragments of a textile-like wall: permeable like the negative space in thick foliage or absences in memory. The suspended, planar pieces, rooted to the ground by two corner elements, seem as if they’ve been pulled from a site of ruin. The pieces contain real hydrangeas: compressed through vehement, bodily gestures into clay vessels, the pressed flowers are extruded into three-dimensions, bearing handprints. In their crevices, pieces of the protective ceramic shell remain.

Referencing Foucault’s heterotopia, an illusory space is created: the smallest parcel that is the totality of that (my) lived world. Wax strands, candle-like, are placed intentionally in a man-made grid. The wax renders useless strands of yarn that contain familial histories, freezing them in a state of twisted tension.

What comes next? A continuation. Like hydrangeas in foreign soils whose colours change, the fragments will transform, trying to make permanent the impermanence of memory.

Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Harper Perennial, 1994.

Vogt, Max. "Table and Tablecloth: Joseph Paxton and Gottfried Semper”. In Island Living II: Readings in Architecture, Originally published in Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture, 1984. Reprinted in Island Living II: Readings in Architecture, edited by Donald McKay, 237-260. Waterloo, 2013.

Foucault, Micheal. “Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias”. In Island Living II: Readings in Architecture, edited by Donald McKay, 263-280. Waterloo, 2013.