AMANDA DENNY
visual storyteller
Keepsake
Keepsake, 2023
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Fighting for air amongst the detritus of an affluent house’s clear out, I spotted you - torn, stuck but half smiling against shattered glass. A record of another time. I rescued you in the only way I could, on my camera, preserved in the smallest of ways. From this yellow container rose a positive gift of memories, a keepsake, from an otherwise destroyed space and time. I will nurture you, embellish you with textual entrances and start a conversation to allow you to fly elsewhere.
Who are you?
Why are you here? What were you there?
This project ‘Keepsake’ is part of a wider series ‘Meanwhile’ which began as a response to Modern Art Oxford’s ‘Activating our Archives’ community programme, collaboration and the pandemic. The collaboration arose from an email to friends and colleagues in the photographic community requesting submissions of meaningful, personal texts and offered up two written pieces as my entrance points. ‘”What is the use of a book" thought Alice "without pictures and conversations”’(Lewis Carroll) and 'Wild Geese' (Mary Oliver’s poem) “Whoever you are are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination …” . The texts received were their response to the first lockdown or taken from their own archive.
The ‘Meanwhile’ series investigates our mental spaces, cognitive biases, social stigmas and cultural expectations, where memory, time and nostalgia create their own fictitious overlay. The tone of ‘Keepsake’ is about rescue, holding on, and hope - green shoots and new dialogues that also engages with non-linear time, gender, colonialism and migration. It counter balances ‘Down, down, down and still the weeds prevail’ from the ‘Meanwhile’ series which is more introspective in tone.
The visual material of ‘Keepsake’ is predominantly photographic but also includes some ancillary archival material (illustrations, documents) and continues to blend image and text. A few of the collaborative texts will nestle alongside Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘The Clock’. As with much of my practice the work is process driven with the main resolution exhibited in material photo book form.
The work offers to the viewer a chance to unfold an alternative narrative from their own cultural vantage point, by stimulating empathy and inquisitiveness and can be entered through the images or the texts. Stories can help us navigate our environment and change our ways of seeing and ‘to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of the world’ (Rebecca Solnit).