The Belfast Review Team | 18 February, 2024
Week 1: Memory & Experience
Featured Artist: Laura Davis
Welcome to Week 1 of our Spring Blog (February - May 2024). Each week we plan to feature a small selection of artists, photographers, writers, poets, and song writers, with works relating to certain themes. Certain days of the week will focus on different creative forms, for example:
'Feast Your Eyes' Sundays (art, media, photography), 'Wordy' Tuesdays (fiction, nonfiction, flash), and 'Rhythm-Verse' Thursdays (poetry and song lyrics).
This week we're exploring the theme of 'Memory & Experience' with featured creatives whose work interrogates or portrays the use of memory and personal experience, as elevated to an art form.
INTRO
We're personal fans of written or typed text in relation to physical places, objects, people. It's weird, but if you take a scrap of poetry and photograph it half buried on a beach, or scribble it over your hands held out to catch the falling rain – it's a YES from us (take note, future submitters). It doesn't have to be just text. The juxtaposition of objects, images, art in unusual places also fits the bill. (Perhaps that's why we find graffiti and street art is so compelling?) In any case, we were delighted to come across the work of this week's artist literally weaving physical text with fabric, and also found objects with handmade paper.
Why does it trigger the dopamine in our brains? We think it's something about the externalisation of words and objects literally pressed, embedded, or made part of a new physical environment that embodies the way thoughts, memories, and experience impress upon our hearts, minds, and souls – creating new pathways, altering our internal geography. It takes what was separate and makes something new and inseparable - the way experiences can change us forever.
Also – it's cool to look at.
Vrouwenvliet
LAURA DAVIS
An ecoprint of various foliage on 200mg drawing paper.
Corpse of day
LAURA DAVIS
An embroidery on various domestic textiles, gesso, raw and kneaded (momigani) paper from The Return of the Native (Thomas Hardy).
ARTIST BIO
Laura Davis is a poet and textile artist who lives in Belgium. Her collection Found & Lost came out in 2022 and she had her first solo exhibition in 2023. Her website is poetry.lauradavis.eu. Her text and textile poems have appeared in a range of publications.
Special thanks to the artist for trusting us with her work.
Thanks to all of you readers for reading! Be sure to like, follow, and share.
We have more wonderful creatives coming up this week. Stay tuned for 'Wordy' Tuesday (20 Feb) featuring NonFiction pieces by Carol McGill and Christina Hennemann, and 'Rhythm-Verse' Thursday (22 Feb) with poetry by Diarmuid Cawley and song lyrics by Madelinksi.
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Best of luck!
Opmerkingen