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Lenni Morkel-Kingsbury

Studio practice

Artist’s statement…
It begins with restlessness, a symptomatic yearning to seek, gather and recollect obscured and sometimes hallucinatory memories and displaced histories.

I am a visual artist who makes handcrafted objects to tell stories.

My art making process is a conduit for the performance of memory: psychological transition; re-construction and re-affirmation of self.

The objects that I make explore the relationship between memory and identity, and our connections to each other and the world around us.

Sometimes I begin with words, a poem or piece of prose I’ve written or something I’ve read, collected and remembered fragments of meaning, fragments of conversations I’ve overheard or had, things I remember. Other times my work begins with kept and collected objects that I’ve hoarded or that people have sent me, along with their own memories and stories associated with that object.

The resulting art objects are ironic reminders of febrile attempts to counteract the side effect of time, of forgetting…

The world is in a constant state of flux.  In an attempt to take stock and figure out where or who we are, we often turn to the past, to our memories.

Memory is a precious but fragile object that we try to hold onto, but that inevitably disintegrates, shifts and changes with every recollection and reconstruction in the present. Memory is connected with concepts of self and identity – something that is fickle, constantly changeable, variable, and to a certain extent unpredictable.

Objects become anchors for memory and identity, giving both tangible, albeit it temporary expression. Jewellery and adornment offer personal expression of our stories and identity. Once the object is viewed by,  passed to,  worn or used by someone else, it takes on additional, new and changed meaning.

My desire to give transient and sometimes intangible memory and transient identity the shape and form of jewellery, highlights this tension between fixity