Memento, 2015-2022
Beth Sheehan
Nine panels and a time-capsule housed in a clamshell box. Prints: Inkjet printing, letterpress printing and trace monotypes. Time-capsule: Inkjet printing, sand from childhood home, pebbles, clovers, eyelash.4 inches x 5 inches x 1 inch (closed).9 pages. Edition of 18.
Due to my lack of episodic memory, I have become obsessed with the documentation of my past. The photographs in this piece are inkjet prints of Polaroids that I took while visiting my childhood home in 2014. While home, I also documented my childhood journals. The trace-monotype text on these nine panels is from an excerpt of one of my entries. The act of re-writing the entry through trace monotype on each panel for the edition afforded me a kind of catharsis. Through the repetition, my aim was to solidify the memory of that day in my mind forever.
The letterpress printed text was derived from my attempt to recall the events of the journal entry a year after repeatedly re-writing it. So much of the entry has disappeared from my memory, leaving me with only hints and feelings of the day long past.
Finally, the clamshell box and time-capsule were created 7 years after the original prints were made. Science suggests that the cells in our bodies replace themselves every 7 years. This fact is particularly interesting to me when contemplating how memories are likely stored and transferred to new cells during this regeneration process. By housing the remnants of the memory in the new clamshell box, the memories remain protected and are given a new context.