‘Our memory is outside of us in a rainy breath of time’.
Annie Ernaux
‘Memory - the pattern of sedimented enfoldings of iterative inter-activity - is written into the fabric of the world’.
Karen Barad
Alan Boardman is a visual artist and arts worker. His practice incorporates painting and photography and occasionally sculpture, informed by an interest in theories of memory and the materiality of the image in the age of fossil carbon.
Materialised through the derivatives and energies of fossil carbon, the contemporary image is underpinned by industrial extraction and chemical synthesis. An image is a fragment of deep time, a reanimation of geologic memory. The image is a kind of ‘trace fossil’ of a once living, sensing and perceiving world, long since folded into the layers of the earth's surface. Image making is a process akin to fossilisation - sensation sedimented into matter.
In this context Boardman’s work is also an exploration of the inter-relation between painting and photography. For Boardman, abstract painting is aligned with embodied recollective memory (Anamnesis). It is connected to the interior world of sensation and affect. While photography is aligned with deposited memory (Hypomnesis), a prosthesis of memory beyond the body. The painted image is an attempt to externalise what is within the body or mind, the photographic image is an attempt to interiorise the world beyond the body. However, the meanings of the painted image and the photographic image are not static but are increasingly entangled and interchangeable. The industrialisation of memory has further blurred the distinction between painting and photography, embodiment and fragmentation.
Recent paintings from the ongoing series ‘Chromatic Inscription’ are trace abstractions, eroded pigment on an aluminium surface preserved under a synthetic resin. While his recent photographic works from the ongoing series ‘Mnema’ capture the uncanny compositions of cinders of burnt books, giclee printed on hahnemuhle photo rag paper. These visual forms share a sense of the image as a mutable material substance, forever dissipating and materialising, erasing themselves in their making, both fossil and effigy. These works attempt to preserve a process of degradation, erosion and loss.