The Rock Archive

In this project, I have begun a photographic archive of a collection of rocks and shells as the base for 'Cosmographia'. The series is a documentation of artefacts I have been collecting steadily since childhood. The work is inspecting several themes involving memory and time. By collecting each rock/shell, they then act as a symbol or trigger for the memory, location, time and feeling. The choice to archive portrays our basic impulses as mortal human beings, our wish to remember and be remembered, in essence, the ambition of a surrogate immortality.

 

Both these artefacts and an archival body are akin to a memory trace, however, it can never fully convey an experience. Yet an archive can act as a trigger for social remembrance. The crux of the archive is its individuality and wholeness, in which singular items have their own inherent connotations. The archival form collates these meanings to form a wider purpose, point or perspective. Unlike many other bodies, these do not cancel each other out but rather work together simultaneously as a 

 

The fragmentary nature of an archive means that it cannot be a legitimate representation of its context. This is especially highlighted in this work as over the passage of time, the memories connected to some of the rocks/shells have faded away.