‘Memory Marks’ (part of Puffpaper V)

This is a selection from a series of monoprints made for ‘Puffpaper V’ 2025, an annual invitational exhibition at Artpuff, of works on paper. They were shown alongside prints by Diana Orinda Burns and Michael Wolfe.

This series is part of an ongoing exploration of body memory evoked as marks on paper. Contemplating memories of the physical experience of walking through Kalimna Park forest reserve in Castlemaine, the marks and shapes that arise on paper weave together these memories – the shapes, sounds and textures received by the senses while walking appear on the page before me – creating what feels like talismans relating to that place and my relationship to it.

The painted monoprint images keep repeating, but are always slightly different. They remind me that, even though I walk these same trails day after day, I’m ‘unmade’ each time I walk – “the eye sees what it didn’t see before... I am a manifestation of its total life” as the walker and writer Nan Shepherd says in her book, The Living Mountain: to keep opening to this uniqueness and mystery is to keep refreshing that memory, to stay alive to the way the land keeps speaking through these images.