Jon Hogbin BA (Hons)
Exploring the relationships between loss/remembrance and temporality/permanence, my work looks to return forgotten memories to spaces where they would once have inhabited. Having since a child kept ephemeral objects that represented a memory and had a keen interest in the taking of and looking at photographs, I have come to realise that the capturing, holding and grounding of a memory is something that is very important to me. This has informed my practice of searching out memories from the everyday lives of places, memories that have faded due to a modern evolution in our societies. It could be language that has faded from use or skills from trades that have been mechanised. My practice is to make a subtle intervention within a space so that a faded memory reappears quietly once more in its past environment. The materials I choose to make this intervention with will be dictated to contextually and also by the desired temporal nature of the memories return. The memory in that space is permanent but the highlighting of that memory should be allowed to fade once again, mirroring it slipping from our consciousness.
The Setting Up and the Slipping Away 2015
The piece shown here depicts the return of a shipwrights maul to what was once the site of the Anderson, Rigden & Perkins shipyard slipway on the foreshore at Whitstable. Teams of shipwrights working in unison would hammer in wedges lifting the ship off the dock blocks on which it was built, transferring its weight on to a layer of grease allowing the ship to slide down the slipway into the water.
The material used to render the representation of the maul was intrinsic to the space to which it was returning, it was chosen for its temporal nature in that environment. The maul, cast in frozen sea water slowly melts until it has disappeared, the physical representation of a memory slowly fading back into the environment in which it once existed and from which it was made.
Whitstable Words 2013
This art project was conceived as a way of returning some old words whose origins are said to be in Whitstable back into the landscape in which they were once used and back into people’s consciousness.
Inspired by the book “We Remember Whitstable”, where the words and their definitions were taken, ten words were subtly placed onto the groynes on the beach between Keam’s yard and the old Coastguards lookout near Nelson Road. The words were stamped into the wood with 3mm high lettered stamps, the words suddenly appeared back in the landscape and slowly over time weathered and disappeared, mirroring how words appear in language and over time their use fades until they cease to be used.
Two hundred leaflets were produced detailing the project, each with a hand printed map of the stretch of beach in which the words were hidden. These were then posted through various letterboxes in Whitstable in the hope that the residents would go out to find the words. A Word Press blog – whitstablewords.wordpress.com was set up and the definitions of the words posted on it, so that as the words are found their definitions could be discovered.
Rose Haven 2012
For the Rose Haven project I returned some found images of my late grandparents to their now empty bungalow. By projecting images from slides taken at the time they moved into the property some thirty years before I wanted to return the memories back onto the fabric of the building for one final time.