Why Remembrance Becomes a Visual Practice
Symbols of remembrance across cultures and memorial traditions exist because memory is never entirely abstract. People give it a body through flowers, candles, names, portraits, food, architecture and repeated gestures. These forms do not simply preserve the past; they organise the relationship between the living and what has been lost. I am especially interested in remembrance as an active visual practice rather than a passive act of looking backwards. In my own artwork, eyes, doubled faces, vessels, serpentine lines and enclosed borders often function as containers for memory. They suggest that remembrance can circle, return, distort and grow, becoming part of the present rather than remaining fixed behind it.
Flowers and the Fragile Life of Memory
Flowers appear in funerary customs, graveside offerings, domestic altars and public memorials across many cultures, although their meanings vary widely. Their beauty and decay make them powerful symbols of remembrance: they honour a life while acknowledging that no physical form lasts. White flowers may express mourning or purity in one tradition, while particular colours and species carry very different associations elsewhere. What matters visually is the tension between freshness and disappearance. In my artistic practice, flowers rarely behave as simple decoration. They emerge from eyes, cups, wounds and empty spaces, allowing memory to appear as something organic that keeps changing. A damaged flower can represent loss, but new growth from the same stem can also suggest that remembrance creates another form of continuity.
Candles, Lamps and the Presence of a Small Light
Lighting a candle is one of the most widespread memorial gestures because a small flame can stand for presence, soul, prayer, attention or the persistence of memory. In religious and secular settings alike, the act is intimate yet collective: one light can be personal, while hundreds together become a public image of shared grief. The flame is temporary, but the ritual can be repeated, which makes remembrance a rhythm rather than a permanent object. I connect this symbolism to the luminous halos, rings and glowing borders that appear in my work. These shapes do not always signal holiness; sometimes they mark the place where attention gathers. A halo around an eye or face can operate like a memorial flame, holding a fragile image in visibility for a little longer.
Portraits, Photographs and the Face That Remains
Portraits have long preserved the social presence of the dead, from ancestral images and painted likenesses to family photographs placed on graves or altars. A face allows memory to become relational: the viewer is not only recalling a biography but meeting a gaze. Yet memorial portraits can also idealise, simplify or freeze a person into one acceptable image. This tension is important to me because my own paintings often use mirrored or doubled faces rather than stable likenesses. I am interested in how memory divides a person into different versions: who they were, how they were loved, what was hidden and what remains after time has altered the story. The repeated eye in my work can therefore become a symbol of remembrance itself, both watching and being watched by the past.
Food, Vessels and Remembrance Through the Senses
Many memorial traditions use food and drink to maintain a bond with ancestors or the dead. Meals may be shared at graves, placed on household altars, prepared on commemorative dates or made from recipes associated with a particular person. Such practices recognise that memory is carried not only through images but through taste, smell, touch and repetition. A cup, plate or bowl can become a quiet memorial object because it holds both substance and absence. Vessels recur throughout my artistic practice for a similar reason. They can contain flowers, eyes, darkness or impossible growth, turning an ordinary domestic form into a structure for emotional inheritance. An empty vessel may represent loss, while an overflowing one suggests that memory can exceed the boundaries created to hold it.
Names, Inscriptions and the Refusal of Erasure
Memorial stones, embroidered names, written prayers and public lists all use language to resist disappearance. To name someone is to insist that a life occupied a place in history, even when the full story cannot be recovered. At the same time, names on monuments raise questions about who is remembered, who is omitted and which version of history becomes permanent. I often think about this when I create dotted borders, repeated marks or ornamental lines. A pattern can resemble a sequence of names without becoming literal text: each mark is individual, yet it belongs to a larger field. In my work, repetition is not emptiness. It can act as an archive, a visual insistence that what appears small or anonymous still deserves to be counted.
Monuments, Ruins and How Memorial Traditions Shape My Art
Monuments attempt to make memory durable through stone, metal and public space, but their meanings are never stable. A monument may begin as an expression of mourning and later become a site of conflict, exclusion or reinterpretation. Ruins work differently: they preserve absence through what is missing, allowing damage itself to become historical evidence. I am drawn more to this unstable form of remembrance than to heroic permanence. When I bring memorial symbols into contemporary art, I do not copy sacred or culturally specific rituals as decorative motifs. I look instead at underlying visual actions: enclosing, repeating, offering, illuminating, naming and allowing something absent to remain present. These actions connect naturally to my vocabulary of eyes, flowers, serpents, mirrored faces, vessels and ornamental boundaries. A serpent can become the circular movement of inherited memory; two faces can hold conflicting recollections; flowers can grow from a place that should be empty. Through cracks, incomplete circles, broken borders and hybrid creatures, remembrance becomes less like a finished monument and more like a living system shaped by beauty, violence, forgetting and repair.
