INDELIBLE

by JOHANNA CONNOR

Solo Exhibition @ BHG 3 - 15 September 2021

ARTIST STATeMENT

By derivation, the title, Indelible, refers to teenage memories - not able to be forgotten - Summers spent… simply Summers spent. In particular the few I spent with Pat, my dad, in new York.

They were exciting immersions into a world of ‘other ’, those days that filled me with wonder and curiosity.

Coming from the sheltered hollows of West Cork in the 80’s, I was exposed to the monumental and the gargantuan, the fast and the furious, only to find existing within it, a familiar and a local.

New York, the antithesis of West Cork; a parallax exists between them within the senses; in the perception of differences that define otherness yet simultaneously have a measure of familiarity.

Originally this exhibition was to be the fruits of time spent on a residency in NYC.

That was the Spring of 2020. A Global Pandemic was declared on the 12th. of March; international air travel halted and borders closed across the globe. Indelible was postponed and the residency cancelled.

And so, to open in September 2021 Indelible would need to find an alternative becoming.

Immediately following the completion of a Masters Degree in December 2018, I returned to New York to recharge. There, I walked and walked and walked some more, taking photographs of my daily excursions and posting them on Instagram as I went. They became my postcards to family and friends.

Little did I know, that those ‘postcards ‘- those contemplations of invisibles things - would later reveal themselves as the threads of an alternative genesis for Indelible.

Seeking something other, in those indelible times and places I had travelled through, using an amalgam of coordinates, imagery and objects, I sought to hint at a tone that expresses a common ubiquity within.

The title Indelible refers to something continuous, something constant, something that leaves a mark, an impression, and/or is unforgettable - however permanence is transient and change is the only constant. A moment of seeing gone forever; a fleeting moment caught on a postcard or in an object, a moment that has spoken to you. 

Much like the sent, received, and long forgotten faded postcards of the past, these postcards with photographs printed on Zink Polaroid paper are impermanent. In time, as with the subject matter they expose & represent, they too will fade.

Johanna Connor 2021

Group 1 Images 1-23

300gms watercolour postcard x 1.5 / zink polaroid x 3 / coordinates / stamp(s) & signature

Drawings

mixed media on canvas / 22 x22 x 4 cm