When I was ten, someone from a local museum came to my school to show us a mammoth tooth.
I can still remember its size in my hands, the deep ridges running along its sides, its strange, iron-like smell. I was fascinated by the idea that something so enormous had once walked through the same world as us, and that by digging down through layers of earth we could uncover traces of life before our time.
I decided there and then that I wanted to be an archaeologist. And while life took me in a different direction, the past, and the way it reveals itself to us, still fascinates me.
There are certain things from childhood that were so ordinary at the time that we barely noticed them. They simply belonged to the background of everyday life, until one day they were gone.
All the versions of who we’ve been remain within us like rings in a tree trunk.
That is what interests me about painting torn wallpaper with something familiar appearing beneath it. The pleasure is partly in the discovery, but also in the recognition.
It feels like archaeology within our own lifetime.
Sometimes an image you have not seen for years can produce a strange jolt. For a moment, you are not simply remembering the thing itself. You are suddenly closer to the person you were when it was still part of your world.
That feeling sits at the heart of Past & Still.
And I like the circularity of knowing that the ten-year-old who wanted to uncover things from the past is, in a small way, still doing exactly that
