Have you ever lost something profoundly meaningful to you? Something that’s only meaningful to you?
I did. In the midst of my divorce 10 years ago, a box of my most precious belongings went missing. I was told it had accidentally been thrown in the trash.
What was in that box? My art portfolio and years of sketchbooks and journals from my teens and early 20s. I was devastated. I grieved that loss for a long, long time.
But… you know what happened recently?
THE BOX WAS FOUND!
I’ve spent hours going through my old sketchbooks. So many forgotten memories have resurfaced. It’s amazing how memories can get tucked away like that, but not erased.
This fascinates me: How is it that art can hold affective memories? The memories aren’t drawn from any kind of narrative component in the art. Rather, it feels as though the memories are coming from the aesthetic of the art.
I found research about this in trauma studies, and specifically in Holocaust studies. In contemporary (abstract) art, the aesthetic impulse is informed by lived experience (Bennett 2005).
So, it’s the memories of lived experiences that inform the creative process. Memories are thus embedded in art. Those memories are then recalled via affect—by experiencing/consuming that art.
So, little did I know in the 1990s that I was keeping memories in my sketchbooks. Memories that wouldn’t be remembered until the 2020s!
