Cleo Shedden on Marked For Memory
“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of
Trauma
The first time I met Isis Horne-Hill was outside the classroom in the summer after my first year of university. We recognized each other from online classes but had never actually spoken. I don’t remember which one of us first called out to the other, but I recall what followed. She’d been guarded and a little cold as we stumbled through introductions and the awkwardness of a first real meeting, and I worried she didn’t really like me that much. But before I walked away, she handed me a flower she’d picked and for the rest of the day I kept looking at that flower, figuring it meant there was some tenderness there. As I had the privilege of getting to know her and her work over the next three years, I came to understand the depth of her honesty, vulnerability, and an intense personal history that she constantly and bravely confronts. Her work demonstrates an unwavering commitment to healing and to herself. To create the work she does is a form of therapy, not just for herself but for her audience as well.
Isis Horne-Hill’s Marked For Memory is a multimedia triumph of brutal, unrelenting honesty. The collection fits neatly into the Marion Nicoll Gallery LRT space, feeling site specific as the sounds of echoing footsteps in this liminal passageway mirror the tactful repetition in her work. Though the collection is compact, tucked away in a hallway gallery, its impact is expansive. Horne-Hill, a recently graduated Print Media student, has a distinctive style and approach to print that pushes the limitations of a medium that is, in my experience as a printmaker, sometimes approached with caution and restraint in institutional settings. Her work seems to have its own centre of gravity, an energy field that calls you into its orbit.
While memory is an oft-explored concept in visual art, Horne-Hill’s exploration stands on its own two feet, anchored and amplified by her raw vulnerability. The cyclical nature of her work and the gritty aesthetic of its display first commands attention, then understanding. Ideas of memory, generational trauma, grief, and dissociation are explored through printmaking, painting, and sculpture, representative and abstract works, and intense industrial installations. This collection calls attention to the ebbs and flows of recollection, memory’s habit of changing, fading, and reappearing suddenly when least expected. The artist’s connection to her materials goes beyond apparent skill in print and sculptural processes: she understands and harnesses the power of each of her materials and harmonizes their communication.
Iron is strong, solid, anchoring. Cotton is flexible and impermanent. The combination of these two elements alludes to the conflicting quality of memory and its transformative nature on the psyche and the body. To what degree can we attach ourselves to the memories that become the makeup of our fragile bodies? In a series of three small prints, a repeated image of Horne-Hill’s body drifts in and out of focus on cotton sheets. Selfhood becomes less and less available to the artist as she grapples with the role of memory and trauma within her own body and mind. Unlike many of the other prints in this collection, these simple shots of Horne-Hill, standing still and facing us head on, are hung by invisible string and thin metal rods. These works are reminders of the fragility of self. We are breakable. We slip. We crack open.
Hung underneath the series of three prints is a large, rounded painting made up of gold dots and dashes upon a black base. This piece is a graph-like representation of Horne-Hill experiencing disruptive flashbacks over a number of days. The twenty-two inch painting exists as a record of the artist’s struggle to control her own mind and her own inner narrative. Certain lines are unbroken, gold circles with no suggestion of disruption. Some lines are dotted over and over, suggesting days when Horne-Hill’s mind takes over her body and becomes a dominating force. This painting seems to exist less for an audience and more for the artist herself, a way to look her struggles in the eye and begin to regain control.
On a massive round support, a page of text and images repeats itself across every square millimetre. The words written, spoken, echoed, are unflinchingly honest, as if they were never meant to exist outside of the artist’s own mind. “I felt like an imposter, tainted and ruined.” The words are written in changing tenses, past becomes future, present has at once already passed. “I want to end it all, to feel nothing, be nothing just to erase everything I’ve seen and experienced.” Though the words themselves suggest a sense of hopelessness or despair, the overall prose drifts again and again towards the hopeful, and the metaphor of the light is never abandoned. “I began to search for any light I could find, I clung to the dim and the flickering. I gathered them to me.” This piece is an echo chamber of her inner narrative, but to speak these words into existence diminishes their intimidating power.
Isis Horne-Hill’s Marked For Memory is the artist’s psyche on full display. The show is at once an opportunity for us to explore her mind and an opportunity for the artist to stand outside of her own body and look in with us. Her work is technically masterful, and her no-holds-barred dedication to vulnerability realises her concept beautifully. Horne-Hill gives and gives. I still have the flower she gave me the first day I met her. I think that our first meeting is a good metaphor for her work. She deals in chains, grainy images, and welded metal, but this harsh exterior gives way to something much different. She possesses the ability to see the vulnerability in others and counters it, softening it with her own.
Check out the archive and documentation for the show written about above:
About the Author:
Cleo Shedden is a calgary based printmaker and writer. She works primarily in silkscreen and photography, and writes about whatever she finds interesting on any given day. You can find her other writing on Substack (NipSlipCity.substack.com) and on Instagram @nipslipcitypress.