Whenever I visit my mother in Barbados, she tries to throw away belongings from the family home. Shoeboxes of heavily damaged family photos from the 1980s - printed with poor quality one-hour printing - made it to her list. The print quality combined with the intense tropical humidity meant that the images are damaged by mildew and stuck together. Now a collection of small uneven bricks, they contain the narrative of my youth, portraying family and friends -a number of whom are no longer alive -and landscapes of a more isolated, pre-internet time on the island, a time that no longer exists. Even if carefully peeled apart, many of the images are only partially legible with ink transferred onto the backs of others or mottled by mildew, abstracted and oddly beautiful. The Shape of Memory explores the meaning of home, particularly as it becomes ambiguous, how we perceive the past and recreate and create memories through photographs and how these damaged images become a metaphor of the imperfection of human memory.

The Shape of Memory - Recollecting is a comtemplative video of the prints being pulled apart and fragments of memories are coming to light. It is one section of a larger body of work The Shape of Memory. Each section functions independently or together as an interdependent series.

This artwork was generously supported by an Ontario Arts Council Visual Artists Creation Project grant.