Fleeting (memories) is about the fallibility of memory. It is part of my doctoral research project at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD School of Arts, Hasselt (BE), which is funded by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Hasselt University (BOF21DOC04).

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I began the project in Baltimore during an artist residency at the Baltimore Jewelry Center in July 2022. During that time, I visited various museums and tried to re-create jewellery from the collections that I still remembered after my visits. Perception and memory are influenced by many factors: How concentrated am I? How is the piece presented? Can I see everything? Am I distracted by bystanders?
In the first versions, I looked at the jewels only once before returning to the workshop and carving my memory in wax. I subsequently returned to the museums and created second or even third versions. In the final versions, I locked away my wax carvings for months, trying to forget and then remember them. The results were not intended to be exact copies of the originals. Moreover, they were meant to visualise the unreliability of (my) memory.

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The pieces shown below are the final versions of this project. They are reproductions based on memories of objects no. 57.1921, 54.433 and 54.432 from the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, US), as well as objects no. 2022.79, 2022.84 and 2022.80 from the Baltimore Museum of Art (US). The memories were modelled in wax immediately after the museum visits (in 2023), then stored in a box for a year and finally reproduced again (without looking at the modelled wax objects from the box).
Interestingly the memory of the recreation in wax was much stronger than the memory of the original objects. And of course, originally, I remembered many more pieces from my visits, but unfortunately, memories are fleeting.

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Years: 2022–2024

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