Remebren by Ibby Lanfear

About

Remembren: a 14th century, middle English word meaning to keep, or bear someone in mind.

Never more obvious in the UK than in the drought this summer, it seems we are in a period of transition, a liminal moment when we are mourning the end of the world we have known and are as yet unsure how to traverse the new. The work in this exhibition represents an ongoing search for a practice that brings us back into relationship with the living Earth and the many others with whom she is shared. Turning towards evidence offered by our Mesolithic ancestors in a quest for more reciprocal ways of being, here making becomes a visceral art of recognition and remembrance; an act of care, and quiet resistance within the dominant 'unmaking' of life that is the Anthropocene.

'Remembering' writes philosopher Vinciane Despret, 'is not a simple act of memory. It is a creative act involving fabulation, captioning, and especially fabrication...Remember - re-member, as in recompose.' Through drawing and writing, the work tells stories about our more-than-human kin, about those who have died and those who are dying, and, via the ancient continuum of pigment making, physically brings them into the spaces and conversations of the living. In a process deeply rooted in the particular materiality of place, natural pigments are found and foraged, grown and harvested. Earth is sifted and washed; bones charred in the absence of air; plants simmered and laked; panels made to an original 14th century recipe. The pieces are collaborative, relational, and in looking backwards perhaps suggest ways to move forwards: towards empathy, reciprocity, and the development of new rituals that might allow us to grieve the loss of the old, while tentatively stepping, with hope and fear, into the new.