While reading this year's Common Read, The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, I stumbled upon this quote:
"When the wind rustled my hair, I would give him a look
as if to ask whether he'd noticed my perfume."
Which served as my inspiration to create this collage. This book beautifully articulates memory - and while it primarily communicates the loss of it, I found a warm, hazy and ephemeral feeling within the passage where this quote is from. The main character is remembering her mother's story of her and her father before they married. Not to spoil too much, but many aspects of this memory had since disappeared one way or another - making this passage romantic yet vague.
In making, I took inspiration from David Hockney's "joiner photos" - but rather than depict a singular moment in time, I used collage to express the essence of a memory. The double exposure prints combine the mother and father's gazes. Each image is arranged to move left to right as the figure turns her head, while the male figure watches from the bottom left corner. The resulting collage looks like a woman's face - yet it lacks the clarity of a real person.
