Lost Memories (2023)
> StevieRay Latham, Jane Hughes & Mina Fouladi
> 231 Old Kent Road
> March 2023
Installation photo: 'Lost Memories' (2023) at 231 Old Kent Road
Lost Memories presents the paintings of three South London-based artists who use images from their family albums to launch enquiries into memory, remembrance, culture and belonging. By engaging with personal photographs, these artists explore a sense of collective identity that comes from familial history, opening conversations with the past through the painting process. This exhibition explores the relationships and dialogues between the artists’ practices and looks at how painting can be used to exhume the memories and histories hidden within everyday images.
StevieRay Latham’s haunted images interrogate the veracity of the photographic archive through the lens of oral histories by layering family photographs with costumes and symbols found in British folklore and the archive of Hans Christian Andersen’s paper cuts. Jane Hughes’ work evokes Freudian concepts of the uncanny as the artist excavates a collection of photographs and films which had been hidden from her family for many years. Mina Fouladi’s work explores nostalgia by painting childhood memories of places that no longer exist in Iran and images from recent YouTube videos from the same geographic locations in order to stitch the past to the present.
Installation photo: 'Paper Cuts' (2023) Oil, acrylic and charcoal on calico, 137 x 167cm
In Conversation: StevieRay Latham, Jane Hughes, Mina Fouladi
SL: When we first got to Camberwell, we had to give a short talk about our work and research, and I remember, Jane, you were looking at ways that you could explore your own family history and from that, tap into something universal and to deal with memory and ideas of remembrance, which I think are really interesting. Then, seeing your paintings, there was something that reminded me of Mina’s work. You can tell that they’re painted from photographs and you can sense a patina in the way that each of you treats the photograph that stays true to a sense of time, and a feeling that time has passed since the image was taken.
JH: I suppose that's partly that formal thing of the past where you all got together and had your photograph taken.
MF: Now, the framing is not as thought about. It's kind of sad when we go on to these fast-paced kind of images, because of how accessible our phones are, it’s really changed the care that goes into taking a photograph. A lot of family photographs are just selfies now. Maybe in 20 years, I'll be painting those because they're relevant to that ‘time of the selfie’, maybe by then we'll all be doing 3D scans of ourselves. I think there's a real sense of longing in Jane's paintings but they’re very haunting as well. It's like this fight between the longing and this ghost that almost is part of you, following you. I don't know if that makes sense?
JH: It does make sense. I have to be careful not to be pure nostalgia and not just trying to recreate the photograph for the sake of it, it’s trying to evoke for me what the feelings are.
MF: Stevie does that really well. You're really pushing those narratives in how you present the characters in your paintings and usually it's based off of family photographs.
JH: Yeah, with ‘Paper Cuts’, you've got a whole cross-generational thing, with everybody in the same image, rather than just having who was actually there. That's what's fascinating about your work.
SL: I’m trying to bridge time within the image but I think that’s also similar to when Mina says that she might paint selfies one day, it's this idea that a passage of time has to take place before we're ready to return to those images or maybe time gives a new kind of gravitas to the image. The passage of time is a necessary part of the process. I don't know whether you feel like this Jane, because all of your images are also older images?
JH: Absolutely yes, and not of my family now, but very much of my years growing up.
MF: I took pictures when I was in Iran this summer and I just couldn't paint them well. When I was working from the 2003 images, from 20 years ago, I was using really light washes of acrylic and it had this ghostly feel, but coming back to paint these images that I took a few months ago, the paint was too heavy, is was quite clunky, it was too soon to paint them.
Above (l & r): Installation photos of 'Lost Memories' (2023) at 231 Old Kent Road
SL: What do you think it is about the time or the distance that enables you to approach it in a way that's more free? We've called the exhibition ‘Lost Memories’ and there's this idea of something that occurs in that artistic process: are we trying to recapture memories that are actually just beyond us? Trying to capture a memory that has actually gone? Maybe it's overextending yourself beyond real memory that creates that space for the painterly discoveries to occur?
MF: Yeah, I think that's spot on. I'm too attached to those moments that just passed and I can't fully honour them. It's not an accurate representation because it's still so clear in my head, so I'm going beyond the photograph to get this feeling, but this detachment is necessary to have the freedom to put your own spin on it of who you are now. Being detached from these moments helps me to really play with them.
JH: These aren’t my memories at all. These are memories of stories that my mother told me about her friend, so although they come from the photographs, they’re actually stories that I've been told because I've never met these people, but they still have great meaning to me because I'm told that they are about family.
SL: I associate with that. A lot of the images I use are from generations further back, my great grandparents or people I've never met. I started using these paper cutouts and folkloric signifiers to reinforce the analogy between folklore and oral traditions in that way. Oral traditions play a massive role within the family and the way that we read our own family pictures. My family album predates me by a long way and whenever you look at the family photos, it’s in a situation with Granny and Grandad and it comes with a narrative that, I'm sure, has deviated from an archival truth. I think that's interesting, despite the veracity of those stories being called into question, they still have shaped us in one way or another.
MF: Yeah, it’s this Chinese whispers of memories that have been anchored to this one image, but the story can shift depending on who's telling it. There’s one photo of my dad as a baby and I've had three different people tell me something new about the photograph because they have their own memories attached to it.
JH: My painting’s that are taken from film stills are slightly different, because it's freeze framing a moving image, which tells a different kind of story.
MF: What made you want to stop and pause?
JH: Well, the fact that I hadn’t had access to these until now and, for me, family films are very performative: people say, “we’re going on holiday or we’re having a birthday party” but if you freeze frame you can capture people's actual expressions, caught in the moment of not necessarily being wonderful and happy. So I suppose it's an exploration in truth and memory.
SL: The idea of freeze-framing makes a comment on the idea of film, but also on photography because it brings into sharp focus that these moments that are immortalised in one snapshot, weren't a snapshot, it was just one millisecond within a period of time. It opens an interesting dialogue about time, because we're thinking of time in terms of generations, but also there's this idea about how ephemeral that moment was. I feel like your work really highlights that when done in series, some really interesting things come out of that. Am I right in saying that you hadn't seen these films in a really long time and that you’re in them, but don't remember the time?
JH: I don’t remember those because I was a small child so it's very strange looking and relating to others but not relating to myself in those images. There’s one of my mother before I was born, dancing around with my sisters; the domestic, everyday, just caught in tiny moments. There’s something so beautiful about capturing moments in movement, which, in traditional photography, you don't get, because people stand still.
Above (l-r): Conversations with My Ancestors (2022) Oil, oil stick, ink and charcoal on calico, 139.5 x 164cm; Installation shot, Lost Memories at 231 Old Kent Road
MF: I think that's the main difference between moving image and a photograph. The photograph, when you really break it down, is just light being captured from this millisecond of the moment and then it's paused and nothing changes after that; but, everything’s changing after that. After that moment, nothing's ever the same.
SL: A lecturer at Camberwell asked me why I thought so many people are so caught up with delving into, not just archival images, but your own family? I wondered what you thought about that?
MF: I read ‘The Past is a Foreign Country’ because this was a question for me also, why now? In this book, it says that the past is comforting and it's our home, because we've come from the past, so it's safe. With the climate of the world at the moment, the future seems so scary and it shows how uncertain the future feels for most of us if we're all delving into the past. Beyond that, my situation might be a little bit different because I'm of a diasporic community and so I have two homes, and the sense of longing for one comes when I'm in the other.
JH: So you have a longing for Iran?
MF: Always, that's why I paint all the paintings from Iran, but maybe if I moved to Iran I’d start painting England. Sarah Ahmed says that for diasporic individuals, a sense of home comes from talking about the motherland, even if you're not from the same place, these conversations of the past take you into a sense of comfort and home. Maybe we're all feeling a bit homeless.
JH: I remember you, StevieRay, were talking about becoming aware of death and grief and that's part of it as well isn’t it. That sense of loss and trying to grapple with it. It's really interesting that we all have the same reference material, in a sense of photography, but we come at it from different angles. I really struggle sometimes to justify why I really am so obsessed, fixated on those kind of images. I think it's about secrets. Just trying to understand what I experienced through photography and then into painting.
SL: Trying to exhume an experience from an object. I like the idea that a photograph can be a mnemonic device. Freud talks about that mystical writing pad.
JH: A sort of palimpsest.
SL: Yeah, an example of the way that traces are held within things and that somehow a memory can be locked in. I guess you could think about it in one way, that within your mind there are hidden memories, repressed maybe, that are re-evoked by a photograph. Then, I like this Derridean idea of hauntologies, that some ideas lay dormant in the substrata. Are memories all locked within your brain and access through objects or can the objects hold memories in themselves outside of you?
JH: For me, there’s so many photographs I don’t have, and you deal much more with the imagined, whereas I have to actually have the physical thing to evoke that feeling for me. I really like that you use your family folklore in your paintings.
SL: I don't know whether that's because we're a family that likes to tell tall tales or whether that's to do with my approach or what. My Granny would tell stories about my Great-Grandfather, who features in a lot of these paintings, but who I never met. It was such a mythologised telling, it wasn't a real man, it was this saint. I remember me and my brother always snickering about it when we're younger. “Here comes another story.” In my mind, it intermingles with all of those stories your grandparents tell you when you were young; British folklore and these tales of where you come from get mixed with tales of Dick Whittington and Robin Hood and some of them were jokes that we didn’t understand, so we’d take all of it as history. It takes you becoming an adult to even question what bits were real, and even then it might take the rest of your lifetime to actually untangle real from unreal and yet it still forms that basis that you understand all things off of.
JH: Yes, my mother was adopted so she was told that her mother was a Greek ballet dancer and that her father was a teacher. This is so far from the truth. There are mythologies and they are completely nonsensical, they have no basis, but it’s a longing to have something exotic and not to just be an illegitimate child abandoned in a workhouse. Do you have that kind of family Mina?
MF: I attach myself more to space than perhaps stories of people. I don't really listen, I think I'm just constantly looking. I also create imagery from stories that my mom tells, because when people tell a story, you create your own version of it in your head. That is something that I'd like to explore but like Jane, I find it hard to paint from memory. The figures have to be from archival imagery. The space can be imagined.
Above (l-r): 'Kids in the Graveyard' (2023) Oil, acrylic and charcoal on calico, 137 x 183cm (detail); installation shot: Lost Memories at 231 Old Kent Road
JH: I suppose that’s the whole essence of archival, it is what’s left out that’s so fascinating.
MF: Exactly, what we’re holding in our brain caves.
SL: The way that you're approaching these pieces, reminds me of Francis Bacon and Edvard Munch, how these artists would use photographs of people and then use their imaginations to put them in a space that would reflect an emotional or psychological element.
MF: The word I come back to is essence. I'm really trying to capture the essence of these moments, and what they felt like to me, and that comes from this blend of the photograph and my perception, the memory that I'm clinging on to.
JH: I suppose I take elements of different photographs and rewrite the story to capture that essence. So I bring in different things but they are almost like a collaging of photographic memories and images.
MF: It's interesting that there's this factual image of this time, and then you're bringing it into the present by letting it travel through you and expressing your own ideas based on who you are now, to create this new image. When you're painting it, it is travelling through you, it's going through your eyes to your hand, and that's becoming the painting. The camera has taken a picture of us and now we are a camera to the photo and then the photo then turns back into this painting and it's this cycle of capturing.
SL: And you’re questioning the veracity. You said that you've got this ‘factual photo’ and I suppose it's questioning that, because is a photo factual at all? What is it about a photo that’s more factual than our memories? In a way, isn't that all of history? Syphoned through the eyes of us being here now.
MF: My friend Sveta has a background in law and we were having this conversation about how in court you use your memory for evidence. There's a memory refresh that happens before you go into trial, you're allowed to go over your statement because sometimes it might be a year until the trial. How crazy is that? That in that sense, memory is fact, the future of this person is now based on the credibility of your memory or the accuracy of what you remember. But then when I come to a painting, I'm almost not trusting myself and I think that's why the photograph is a really important reference point for me, because it helps. It’s like an access point to the past that I need to trigger what I’m trying to convey in my paintings.
JH: And also that sense of something that was animate that I’ve frozen and I’ve tried to reanimate it in the stills paintings, that's the same thing.
MF: StevieRay, what made you paint ‘Kids in the Graveyard’?. What was the inspiration behind it?
SL: That one started, like some of Jane’s works, with a still from a Super 8 film that my uncle converted, so it was on the computer. I was going through this digital archive of old analogue footage and on a MacBook and you can hold the arrow keys and scan for frames. It almost references the frames of the film and we are digitally doing the same processes. I found this one image of kids, I guess my uncles and aunts but it’s hard to tell because it's very low resolution, you can tell that from the way that I'm painting them as silhouettes, but they're playing on tombstones in Highgate Cemetery. My Great-Grandad has taken the family out to Karl Marx’s grave to lay a wreath and the kids aren't interested and start playing on these tombstones. When I saw these photos and films, it happened to coincide with a lot of people in my family passing away and so the idea that they were actually in a graveyard was such a poignant thing because they were young and playful at the time and now we've come full-circle. I was thinking about that almost like a visual pun, but with pathos. The flat silhouettes of the figures reminded me of these silhouettes in Hans Christian Andersen's paper-cut archives, and I like his archives because they're like a visual representation of these folktales. To bring together different ideas of memory; cultural memory, familial memory, mortality and dream, was an experiment, all of these things I've been thinking about on one big canvas.
MF: I think it's very successful in capturing all these ideas, and it has a real essence, real atmosphere.
JH: It does. It is unsettling, the idea of the child lying on a gravestone and you’re talking about that playfulness, but time has moved on and people have died. It’s ghostly, it’s haunting.
SL: Yeah, that idea of haunting is something that we're we've all touched on a little bit.
MF: ‘Mamani’s grandchildren’ was a painting where I stitched together two photographs. The foreground is my cousins and me, and the mountains in the background are a painting that was hanging in my grandmother's dining room. I was always drawn into that painting, it was one of the first paintings that I experienced. I'm using all the old dried acrylic paint left from other paintings to build the texture of the mountains, so it's almost like we're sitting in the painting. Finding the line between where the mountain ends and we begin was a bit challenging, I really had to think about how to blend this internal and painted external world. Because she had this sheer curtain, I've painted a bit of the curtain onto the trees from the painting and that's where it starts to blend, so it's like playing with this photograph. And then this photograph of a painting, it's become a painting of a photograph with a photograph of a painting behind it. I like to cycle through these things, even the dried acrylic, it's kind of ghostly for me because this is something that was alive, I was using to make other paintings and now it's like, also stopped, it's also paused. It's what painting is, pausing moments. We're just holding them onto this physical plane. ‘Mamani’s grandchildren’ and ‘Baba in spring’ were pivotal pieces for me. That started with a memory of my friend’s pool, because in Iran, we have these big screens that divide the garden so you have privacy because the private and the public world is so different. I was finding it really hard to paint, so I started looking at photographs. There was a picture of my dad sitting in front of some flowers, so I put that on top and the dried paint peels, and then there's a picture of me as a baby also collaged in, and I've been trying to recreate that painting ever since. It's been two years and I'm trying to come back to what I did there.
SL: Did that process happen really easily?
MF: Really easily, I wasn't thinking. I've been reading a book by Philip Guston, he works on one painting for three months, on the same bit of canvas. He's like ‘whenever I start the painting, I'm trying to recreate the painting that I just finished and I think I could never do it again. Then suddenly, there’s that last day, or the last 20 minutes where that feeling comes and you don't take a step back. You're just doing it and then you know it's finished. It's finally captured what you're trying to do.’
JH: And you do know when to stop, don’t you. You do get that feeling, but sometimes, I find it really difficult because I have to repaint and repaint and I don't think it's right and I try and put it away and then I wake up at two o'clock in the morning and think ‘I can't stand it, I need to redo it all over again’ and it is agony. Then when you just see it, you think ‘oh my god, that’s it!’ It’s very strange.
MF: Then it’s like another three months until that feeling can come back. Three months of agony for twenty minutes of calm.
SL: I feel like you have to put that time in to get to those revelatory moments. There's a certain amount of labour required by the universe.
JH: You can't settle for something that somebody else would think is fine. It’s a really deep visceral feeling of what is right for you. Definitely.
SL: Which is, I think, to do with the transformative process of painting because that's another thing that we haven't talked a great deal about; we are all painters, I think we've referenced photography more than we've referenced painting, but we are materially painters. I saw on the materials list the use of a lot of different mediums. I liked this idea that you layered physically to represent layers of memory, and that's a very post internet idea, these layers of time and memory.
MF: And playing with physical and the 2D and the 3D and touch. Even though painting is a flat plane to play with, there’s still so much you can do with texture. Depending on how heavy you apply the paint or how thinly, that can convey a lot. The back and forth between the thickness of the paint and the washes brings together this idea of what’s solid from memory and what's faded, I think that's something important that, as a painter I have to think about.
JH: I’m interested in the two ‘you’s’. What was the reasoning behind two of them.
MF: I painted one and and then I destroyed it. I got to a place where I was really happy with it but then I kept going and I felt like I overworked it, so I started again. The second one is a lot lighter and looser. Then I put the mask on top of it because there was still something in the first image that I captured of myself. The second image is still me, but I've captured something different. That's something I want to explore, how many times can you paint from the same photograph but get a different part of that person or that memory come through.
SL: Yeah, and what can you bring to a photograph through the painting process? I'm interested with your work, Jane, are the colours faithful to the photographs?
JH: No, they’re all black and white so they were the colours that felt for me, what the tiny little black and white photographs were. It was quite liberating choosing how I wanted to colour those pictures. These are called ‘Letters from America’. My mother and her friend hitched to London when they were fifteen, in 1956, they had lived virtually in the same bed and they just adored each other, then Pat left and went to live in America and they never met again but they had all these letters that went back and forth, and there's all the writing on the back of the photographs which are very poignant and so, I was thinking about the ideas of women in the post war period, and the kind of contracts they had to make because they didn't have an education, so it was about marriage and presenting to the world this perfect image of a life outdoors and having children, that’s what that series was about.