Open: Tue-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 12-5pm

15 Hatton Street, NW8 8PL, London, United Kingdom
Open: Tue-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 12-5pm

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Artist: Mac Collins

Mac Collins’ practice interrogates the labyrinthine nature of memory and consciousness. For his first solo exhibition at Palmer Gallery, Between the Rafters, he considers the ‘attic’ as a metaphor for memory; a space at the peripheries and recesses of consciousness where stories germinate, mutate and become myth. Partially inspired by his grandmother’s attic, a physical repository of family stories and familial archives, Collins represents the attic as a labyrinth of shared memories, which have become fragmented and distorted.

Three key sculptural elements structure the exhibition: a crocodile scale, a pair of saloon doors, and an obscure relic. The works exist as fragments of stories and myths: things left out of sight for long enough to warp and distort, becoming artefacts that must now be deciphered. The sculptures slip between different times and tenses, morphing from recognisable domestic forms to forms that remain deliberately ambiguous.

They evoke the experience of looking into the recesses of a memory and encountering something that cannot quite be defined.

For Collins, memory is not something experienced through tangible senses. His sculptures operate as the physical manifestations of the abstract sensations associated with memory: dark and uncomfortable, soothing and reassuring, convoluted and confusing. Their ambiguity is central to their function; they resist fixed interpretation in the same way that memories themselves remain difficult to define.

For Between the Rafters, Collins considers the stories that are told to us, the ways in which they permeate our personal narratives and ossify into memory, or fade into fiction. His work examines the human desire to believe in something, to assimilate with the beliefs of others, to create stories that exceed the limits of lived experience, and to ultimately generate the myths that guide us.

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)