We are exploring the impact of the dis-membering of community & the possibility of re-membering. What is the function of memory & of evoked landscapes, emotional and physical, in this process? We use myths of memory, in which dear limbs are gathered together after slaughter – literally re-membering, as part of the hinterland to some of these ideas. In some versions of the myth of Osiris his murdered body is cut up and distributed across Egypt. These parts are sought out and re-assembled. He is re-membered.

An artworks studio project around dis-membering & re-membering, exploring some of the ideas evoked by this myth around memory, identity, fragmentation & cohesion is in progress.

We feel everything with our bodies – but we don’t always see or show the wounds, the fragmentation, on the outer surface. They make themselves felt on the inside, and in the body’s sense of itself in relation to an interior landscape. In being, we are fragmented by the attack of experience; and yet going on being forces us to assemble and reassemble, compose and recompose ourselves. Seneca’s insight comes to mind: “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage”. We are dis-membered by experience and each other; and we muster our courage to re-member in order to stay standing. The attack of experience is reflected in the work of art – it survives the artist’s attack and is transformed in the process, a representation rather than a re-presentation of the trauma.