un/conscious is a large-scale artwork that features a collection of sixteen brightly coloured tactile canvases, creating a kaleidoscopic wall of colour.

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The textiles featured are recycled offcuts of vintage towels from Re/lax Remade, a sustainably focused, Sydney-based fashion label. Each piece of fabric is embedded with the memories of previous owners, nostalgic and echoing the childhood of those who remember the towels from grandma’s home. Each piece an ode to the generations of families that owned these towels and the memories permeate each fabric remnant. The act of creating this work is an effort to transform the accumulative memories of the textiles into a new work of beauty.

 

Colour is an entity, a portal, a phenomena that arises through the interplay of light and sight, acting on our neurology in order to exist. In a sense we put a little bit of ourselves into each colour as we observe it. Consider this coloured wall of canvases as a representation of the complex narrative of memories carried in the consciousness of each human, while the reflective slices offer a moment of personal festaiuolo and reflection, representing the way we un/consciously project our own beliefs, imaginings and assumptions onto those around us.

 

The process of creating un/conscious took the artist over 6 months and countless pieces of vintage textile offcuts. All the while Jamie-Lee was contemplating the unknown memories embedded in each off-cut, her personal memories and incubating her first child. What has long been considered ‘women’s work’, the long and rich history of women working with textiles is more than just earning a living: it has always been an accessible way of expressing their memories, emotions and experiences. “The reality is that, unlike oil paints, some form of needle and thread are the art materials that have been most commonly and widely available to women throughout history. They have given us women, and continue to give, the power to decorate ourselves and our interior environments, and document ourselves in that process.” (No Man’s Land by Stanislava Pinchuk)

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Throughout the creation of this piece I spent many years contemplating the meaning of our memories through this infinite kaleidoscope of colours that seem to hold the unknown memories of previous owners and represent all that is universal; atoms, leaves, rocks, endless cotton loops, colours, patterns, everything, everywhere, endlessly compressing and expanding around and within us. Each colour radiates its own chromatic vibration, a potential echo with the power to bring forth a memory and to share a personal message. There is an unspoken intelligence that seems to reach us through colour. In Greek mythology Iris the Goddess of the rainbow, uses the rainbow as a bridge between heaven and Earth to bring messages from the God’s.

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The human brain frequently uses emotions to fire and wire our memories into being, the neurons work together with internally generated emotion and visual stimuli to create meaningful patterns, to process and retain information and experiences. Emotion is energy and that energy lights up the neurons in our brain. The process of encoding memories is energetically expensive for the brain, so the brain uses emotion as a shortcut to determine which memories are worth saving. The strength of these emotions dictates to the brain the importance of the experience. Simply put: the stronger the emotion, the stronger the memory. This is the brains attempt to encode important memories, although this can backfire as strong emotion often clouds the truth and we humans have a tendency to grip tightly to the most negative narratives. The rich swirl of memory, emotion and self awareness shape who we are as individuals and this is the foundation we build our identity upon.

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We often believe our memories to be messengers of truth, but what happens when they are opposed by the memories of another, when the same moment is recalled in different ways. Whose version of reality gets to be true?

Each of us can become ruled by distorted memories, some dark, buried and abstracted by beliefs that create subtle protective mechanisms, others float by beautiful, enlightened or forgotten as we grip tight to the ones that more comfortably confirm our existing perception of reality. Although memory pathways are slow to change, they are not unchangeable. There is great value in actively maintaining a healthy scepticism towards our own fallible memories, in doing so we allow ourselves the freedom to change our perception and in turn change our lives. By allowing our identity the freedom to evolve as an ever-changing complex, yet flexible, expression of our memories.

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Consider your time with this work as your chance to contemplate the complexity of your memories and the complexity of those in the other humans around you. Are you ruled by your memories? What memories and messages present themselves as you spend time with this overwhelming rainbow?

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Our ability to enquire with an open-minded curiosity into ourselves and others is directly reflected in our ability to connect with others. Our memories can ripple their way through these connections as overwhelming avalanches of emotion, clouding the true messages. As Carl Jung states: “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” We may feel pushed, pulled and controlled by experiences, by memories that we have unknowingly translated into beliefs but through the process and practice of deep contemplation and compassion we find that we are more powerful in the face of these memories than we think we are. We are the ones who translate our memories into messages. We get to decide the power they hold and the lessons they provide.

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As an artist I am determined to create works that emphasise our individual power to adjust our personal perception, to dismantle autopilot and question each piece of the puzzle with an open curiosity, to live in a state of questions, not answers. Reminding myself that there is such a depth of complexity to each and every human, so much complexity that we must aim towards the north star of compassion and understanding towards ourselves and one another, all the while knowing that we can never truly hold the whole picture in our hands, that the complexity cannot be simplified or contained. It is always expanding and the discovery is never ending.

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“The great human error is to reason in place of finding out” - Simone Weil

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Un (one) / (to perform an action)

conscious (aware of and responding to one’s surroundings)