Memories

Tender, ephemeral memories do disappear if not revived and preserved and art is possibly the most potent vehicle to deal with collective and personal memories in a direct and physical manner.Art offers an opportunity to reflect on major facts of our lives both ordinary and extraordinary:love and death,sexuality and spirituality, the innocence of youth and the wisdom and experience of old age.

Childhood memories have been the springboard for many artists.
Antonio Sosa was born in the 1950s , a little village in Andalusia ,beside the river Guadalquivir .He uses natural material that are found locally such as the river sand as well as recycling the toys of his childhood to create moulds of things that were important to him.The moulds lie open like empty pods indicating that something has been removed.

Antonio Sosa "Seeds on the Right Bank of River Guadalquivir" 1992-1993

Ricky Swallow , an Australian artist living and working in Los Angeles found that geographical distance from his homeland caused him to turn his attention to the conditions and traditions he was brought up in.With his sculptural work  Killing Time, Swallow has delved into his own past as the son of a San Remo fisherman. Killing Time is a life-size table (based on his family's own kitchen table). Upon its surface is strewn a morass of sea life, representations of the marine creatures Swallow himself caught and killed as a youth.
In this regard it is a highly personal work, one imbued with a strange nostalgia. With its deliberately dramatic lighting, the tableaux resembles a Dutch still-life painting.