Please Don’t Ever Let Me Forget
SOLO EXHIBITION BY
Mich Dulce
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Please Don’t Ever Let Me Forget is a visual eulogy: a work of catharsis following the death of the artist’s grandmother, exploring themes of memory, grief and mourning.
With allusions to the craft of Victorian hair work, where hair is assembled into wreaths as a memento of lost love, objects are shaped from strands of hair into items from the artist’s past. Memories become fossilized, at once present and distant, a totemistic link to the past. Hair outlasts the body, sometimes by centuries, and speaks to us of connection and loss. Medium thus takes on a double meaning, both as conduit between artist and artwork, but also between life and death. In the hands of the artist, memory is elevated to relic.
The artist emphasizes the connection between making and mourning as active pursuits. She also establishes a link to her grandmother by working within their shared craft. Embroidery, as a meticulous act and labour of love, serves as a metaphor for the grieving process – a therapeutic repetition or working through, at times joyful and others agonizing. Allusions are also made to the Buddhist practice of hair embroidery, where it is used as a way to construct a personal relationship with the divine.
As projections of the artist’s childhood fragment around the pieces, the viewer is invited to speculate on the significance of these items and the accuracy of the memories they relate, acknowledging their distance, contingency and fallibility. With a carefully curated selection of objects that specifically isolate moments of joy, the question arises as to what has been left out. It is in this respect that the interplay of the personal and the political can be considered, drawing parallels to the political reality of the Philippines today. A reality that could only be determined by selective memory and efforts to carefully curate its history.
