Exhibition > Past > SEB Gallery

SEB Gallery 22.04.2009-20.05.2009

Memory patterns

Memory is paradoxical – it remembers things, yet the things it remembers seem to be irretrievably lost. A human being remembers, regardless of how much experience-based material there is to confirm his or her remembering. But this means that remembering may be the smallest one of all the memory’s functions – memory is much more occupied with distortion and forgetting. Through her sensitive and ethereal watercolours the artist Agne Kuusing-Soome attempts to recover at least for a moment, temporarily the things deemed into oblivion, the distorted things. “Memory Patterns” was inspired by various moments in time, meetings, memories, thoughts. The recollections of a long and interesting life in Setumaa narrated by the artist’s grandmother, childhood memories experienced by the author herself, and journeys and trips to far-away lands glow through the watercolours. The latest most inspirational and shocking experiences were those on the 200 kilometre long journey on foot along Camino de Santiago de Compostela Road. These stretches of the road veiled by positive aura and holiness can also be seen from Agne Kuusing-Soome’s watercolours.

In her watercolours fragments of people and places that are important to the artist have been inserted between the abstract memory images as collages. Memory patterns and layers are deep, textured and rich in detail; some figures rise to the fore more brightly, others are vaguer. In the painting called “Borrowed Memories” the hands symbolise the information of memory and recollections. In the work “Grandmother Remembers” the grandmother’s wisdom and values have been depicted. A human being desires memory – that of his or her own and that of the others. He or she wants to remember and wants to be remembered. The picture called “When I Was Five” is a retrospective self-portrait depicting the world of a five-year-old girl’s thoughts. The laconic headings of the works give slight hints to the viewer and facilitate the orientation in the labyrinth of the author’s memory patterns.

Agne Kuusing-Soome has used diverse possibilities in watercolour-painting for the implementation of various methods and techniques and linkage with other genres. And she is a master of the watercolour, using both the ethereally translucent, flowing style and the more detailed one.

The perception and interpretation of memory, the past and one’s roots is an important subject to Agne Kuusing-Soome and she has treated it also earlier in her creative work. In the year 2000 at the exhibition in Tartu’s Guild Gallery called “Mo mälo omm viil kimmäs“ (“My Memory is Still Fine”) the artist presented installations, graphics and paintings related to the theme of memory. While in those works the artist dealt more with conveying the recollections of others and the memory of others, then in the current exhibition she focuses more on her personal recollections, sensations and experiences.

 

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