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Anna Carlson
textural patterns on cloth and paper
Engram 1, 2015
A few years ago, I began to record stories and conversations with my mother. Through these recollections of her 50-year career as a designer/weaver, I find consistencies with my own creative life. This first work, Engram 1, uses her first encounter with textiles to explore the interaction of storytelling with memory.
The words of the story become material: heard, recorded, printed, stitched, and traced in order to making the invisible visible. The audio recording is fragmented and layered, just as the memory patterns are embedded and re-collected. Dense and open imprints of text refer to the present and past; the text is readable or illegible. Sixty-four layered ‘pages’ tell the story of a story, from hand-written transcription, to a digital typeset screen-printed image of the text on fabric. Each page contains a fragment of the text; the story is not complete on any one. Traced and embroidered words highlight the shared memories, those that mirror my own early memories of making marks on cloth.
Every installation varies; the arrangement is fluid and ephemeral, just as our memories continue to change each time they are recalled.