The Memory Network
The AHRC / Wellcome Trust Memory Network’s 2014 conference, ‘The Story of Memory’ was held at the University of Roehampton on the 4th and 5th September. Paul Bloom, Professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, gave a talk on ‘The Problem With Stories’.
The Memory Network is pleased to present work by the visual artist Fay Ballard, the daughter of the novelist J. G. Ballard. Partly drawn from the exhibition held in 2014 at Eleven Spitalfields Gallery London, we are publishing three key images of drawings from Ballard’s show: two exhibition installation shots of the Memory Boxes shown at Eleven Spitalfields, and a new studio shot of her most recent Memory Box: Dead Mother. Accompanying these images are three contextualizing essays that illuminate ‘House Clearance’. One is written by critic Kathy Kubicki, and two by Fay Ballard herself. The work explores memories and emotions evoked by object found in her father’s home in Shepperton after her died in 2009. The essays and object are not only, in Kubicki’s words, ‘moving contemplation on memory and personal loss, and its relationship to objects and photography’, but also a forensic investigation in the nature of memory, selfhood and the nature of time and consciousness.