Sam Wrigglesworth
This body of work examines the ways in which the natural environment holds memories and traces of past events. Through these spaces I reflect on my own subjectivity as it reconstitutes itself following trauma. This work is about processing, understanding, and healing. The natural environment echoes the past and simultaneously expands, shifts, and moves forward. I look externally to locate and recontextualize something internal and ingrained.
Some environments depicted were previously unfamiliar, while others are specific to distant memories. Returning to environments specific to my memories is an act of renegotiating my relationship to an environment. By extension this becomes a renegotiation between myself and the power of a traumatic memory. Traces of a bodily presence in sand, burned trees (yet alive and resilient) and my body submerged in water all allude to my internal process of healing and quiet acceptance. Trauma is not stable, comprehensible or quantifiable. It has both the presence of marks riven into the face of a cliff, and the quiet absence of an imprint in grass from a body that has turned toward itself.