Memories

Our latest prompt for Wanderlust 2016 was: My First Childhood Memory. As you can probably tell I veered completely off topic once I started to consider the nature of our earliest memories. Do we actually remember moments from our earliest past or do we instead remember the photographs that were taken at the time? That led my thoughts to moments from our past that we do remember as clearly as if they happened yesterday while other times have disappeared so deeply into our subconscious mind that retrieving them becomes virtually impossible. I know for myself that that were times in the past when life was just so busy and filled with work that I lived through them concentrating entirely on the task at hand while almost everything else vanished from mental view as soon as it had happened. I can bring some of latter moments back but it takes a lot of effort and I need the help of my photographs (I am so grateful to have had a camera to hand most of my adult life).

Other times however I lived totally in the moment I was in, and those memories are there whenever I want to revisit them. I even told myself at significant times in the past that I had to store it mentally immediately,  because they were so precious. Why some of life's events and not others depended very much on my emotional state when they happened.

And that brought me to this photograph of myself, taken in Rome in 1976. That was one of those precious memory moments that will always be part of me so I decided to capture it on the pages of my art journal for this prompt. I was very far from being a child but the memory is one of my most vivid.

The spread was done in the Vintage Vanity Art Journal (by Prima) that is quite small (each page is 5 x 7") and ring bound as you can see.

Techniques used: collage (using a copy of the photograph, hand made paper with gold imagery, vintage book text and an Italian postage stamp), rubber stamping, stencilling, outlining with black and white markers.

Tools used: rubber stamps (the Marks set designed by Nathalie Kalbach for Stampendous, and a set by Crafty Notions) and the S404 Grid Outline 4 x 4 stencil from Stencilgirl.

I hand wrote the quotation: Our future begins in our past on the pages using both black and white markers

Despite not sticking to our prompt, it was what led me to make this spread so in that respect I feel I have fulfilled the brief. .