Remembered Imaginings, Imagined Realities: Investigating the Shifting Relationship between Reality and Imagination in Autobiograhical Memory and the Potential Role that a Creative Arts Practice Can Play in that Process

Abstract

In this studio-based research project, the theoretical and creative research combine to speculate that, far from being a passive repository of the past, memory is future-focused and generative. Through our memory, we can plan for and materialise our future. Additionally we have the capacity to retrospectively alter our past, introducing small fictions that alter the nature of our subjective reality in the present. Through an investigation of the methods employed by a number of contemporary artists, in addition to an analysis and discussion of the studio methods and methodology refinements developed during this research, this project argues that visual arts practice acts as both a catalyst and a generative force in this process of change The research explores the means by which artists interrogate the fictive nature of memory, the borderland between the real and the simulacrum, and the capacity of art to create 'that which did not previously exist', in concept, in consciousness, and in materiality.