Inherited Memories

Inherited Memories is an immersive installation that explores how childhood experiences persist across generations through objects carrying personal, familial, and collective histories. Children's toys, notebooks, a school desk and chair, a writing board, a pram, and other found belongings are brought into relation with colourful slip-cast ceramic bricks, forming structures that partially enclose, support, and conceal them.

The familiar objects retain traces of use, play, learning, care, and everyday domestic life. Some remain immediately recognisable, while others are interrupted by the ceramic forms or become visible only in fragments. This shifting accessibility places the objects between preservation and disappearance, suggesting that memory is never recovered as a complete or stable record. It is selectively retained, obscured, reinterpreted, and transmitted through changing circumstances.

The ceramic bricks function simultaneously as protective vessels, architectural boundaries, and agents of transformation. Their modularity allows the installation to be continually reconfigured, altering the relationships between individual objects and the wider spatial structure. Bright colours evoke the visual language of childhood, yet their accumulation also introduces weight, density, and tension.

Rather than presenting childhood as an isolated personal past, Inherited Memories considers how early experiences are carried into adult life and transferred across families and communities. The work reflects on the ways memory survives through material traces, repeated gestures, and inherited narratives. Neither fully archived nor entirely accessible, the objects remain suspended between remembrance and forgetting, while the ceramic structures carry their fragmented histories towards an uncertain future.