Remembering Together - memory, stronger than stone
Remembering Together is a Scotland wide project reflecting on our experiences of the ongoing Covid pandemic, as well as the losses we have endured. Artists, working together with communities, will create memorials in each local authority area. When I saw the call for an artist in Kinross, I was immediately drawn to the project. Covid has profoundly influenced my life and my outlook.
Dealing with chronic illness since a young age, I made the choice to be extremely cautious with Covid from the start. Once lockdowns ended, mask mandates lifted, and with a huge push for ‘back to normal’ I, like many others, felt left behind. When my daughter got Long Covid an even bigger separation occurred. Now four years in, still cautious, still overwhelmed by the lonely necessity of that within this ongoing pandemic, the isolation I have felt has only been tempered by a healing reconnection to nature, the land around me and stone.
My involvement in Remembering Together has been my first foray into public art and, well, the learning curve has been steep. I’ve quickly learned that the intersection between art and public spaces can be fraught, as can the intersection between past and present.
I came to the project with a proposal for a drystone memorial and that’s what was commissioned. However, modern planning laws are incredibly limiting and almost entirely exclude a drystone structure in a public space. To fulfil the criteria required, fully mortaring the structure was suggested. I declined to do this.
I’m sure to an outsider it could be easy to see a drystone wall and a mortared wall as one in the same thing. That is not the case.
Drystone relies on the coming together of mechanics, a perfectly balanced push-pull of forces. Within drystane, the individual and the collective are of equal importance. Drystone is magnanimous. It resists the weather, pulls together and adapts. Mortar is inflexible. An unwilling whole. It will absorb water and then split when it freezes. It will settle and crack as the ground moves beneath it. It is particularly susceptible to the ravages of weather and time.
In a mortared wall, stones are forced together, bound in an inflexible substance, given no choice. There is an element of natural order in drystone that does not exist in stone masonry, and it makes sense that a craft that is thousands of years old has mindfulness, intention and patience built into it.
That’s exactly what drew me to it, and it’s what made me think of drystone for this memorial in the first place. ‘Memorial’ comes from the Latin word ‘memor’ meaning ‘mindful’.
It may seem as if it would be a simple solution to build a mortared wall in place of a drystone one, but outside of my aesthetic and ethical objections are a myriad of practical ones too.
Kinross deserves a memorial and like drystone, it’s important that we adapt. So, I have created what is an equally compelling response to the original brief and something I am excited to make.
The ‘Memory Stones’ are inspired by memory; individual and collective.
The form I have devised comprises large stones, carved with the poem
‘memory, stronger than stone’
Stones will be placed in several locations throughout Kinross. and there will be seven altogether. Three will be placed in a cluster within a central space, two others as a pair in another location, and then the last two as individual ‘satellites’ in other parts of Kinross.
Like the stones of a cairn, individual but part of a collective that makes up the whole. The memorial brings Kinross and its experiences together as part of the same body of work. The poem will be translated into several languages to take into account the diversity of experiences in this ongoing pandemic.
The languages on the stones will be English, Urdu, Mandarin, Polish, Scots, Gaelic and Braille.
I look forward to sharing more soon.