"I have an expanded painting practice that also includes drawing and installation. Recently, I have been using found family archives from the fifties and seventies as source material seeking to find and follow the traces of people now parted. Fragments of my Great Grandparents’ memories are kept in boxes at Nanna’s. I savour wiping the dust off, allowing the lost memories to be interrogated and reinserted into present dialogues.
I’m intrigued by ways knowledge and memories can be both held and passed down. I use specific references from my own memories and speculative memories of others to form my own archive of knowledge.
I have been navigating the question of how to locate (and hold) the remains of a memory through the acts of painting, drawing and writing. I acknowledge the impossibility of understanding someone else’s memory, and so painting has become my method of unpacking as opposed to understanding. By engaging with these oral histories and tactile archives, I have tried to find a way to bring their dialogue into the present. Rather than occupying a process of nostalgia, I seek to both recognise and reckon with the unresolved present."
- Prudence Wilkinson