A certain moment in time

Remembering a certain picture is the melancholy contemplation of a certain moment in time

Marcel Proust

I have always admired the jewellery artist Bettina Speckner. She tells stories through precious materials which she combines with old photographic plates or etched zinc using her own photographs.

The Everyday and the Far Away, 2006, catalogue for exhibition of jewellery by Bettina Speckner

I enjoy the fragmentary aspects of her pieces which, in the words of Dr. Rudiger Joppien, ‘underline the fact that memory is not retrievable in it’s entirety. She simply shows us pieces of mosaic that leave reality - as it once was - in suspended ambiguity’.

Memory isn’t perfect but for me is perfectly incomplete. The anonymous ‘junk shop’ photo album, once someone’s precious memories becomes melancholic. A moment in time held in suspense, a story without a beginning or an end.

We can never know what a person has seen, experienced or considered to be significant in a photograph. In the most banal scene of an everyday occurrence or a dull corner of life there can be an opportunity awaken a feeling; something vague, a feeling.

It is this vagueness, the fragmentary imperfection of memory and the indeterminate notion of melancholy that provokes me to make things.