‘I felt it brush…’, Kate Howe, Installation Shot.

‘I felt it brush my forearms as it fell, keeps falling, over and over. The sun, I notice, is very blue, coming through the leaves.’ (After Gentileschi with Memory totemic)

Kate Howe, 2022, installation, oil paint and stitching on Kraft paper in black surround with lights and Memory totemic, variable dimensions. Collection: Susanna, Installation, Painting.

(1/2) “As I discovered the thousands of versions of Susanna and the Elders carved, painted, stitched, and drawn between 1250 and 1850, I began to print them out and tape them to my studio wall. After a while, my wall looked less and less like a collection of exquisite historical paintings and more and more like the wall of a serial rapist collecting photos of their crimes.

I could not escape the collective trauma in each one of these images and began to recognize the clues linking these cold cases together. The same items were appearing across the centuries: the bench, the cloth, the pool, the oak tree, the mastic tree, the elders, Susanna, the hand shushing, the hand pointing to god.

The cloth. The cloak. The thing they are grabbing. Research then - research the nature of traumatic memory. If these are memories I'm seeing, like Susanna telling her story again and again: and there was a bench, and there was the cloak I was wearing, and then the sun was coming through the trees. There was a bench. If these are memories I'm catching threads of, I learn their quality so I can identify, pull through into the present, and reconstruct the timeline. Trace the tracks of the perpetrators. Follow them, doggedly, like Bosch through the centuries. Everyone counts or no one counts. I research PTSD through the US National Library of Medicine and NICBM…”

‘I felt it brush…’, Kate Howe, Detail Shot.

(2/2) “Susanna is talking to me again: and then I looked up and I remember he had his finger pressed to his lips, and his mustache curled around his finger, and his fingernail was chipped. What color was his hair? I don't know. The hair near his finger was brown and white and clumped together, I remember because it covered part of his finger. It was long. And then cold air on my arms and the feeling of the cloth falling. The sun came through the leaves really brightly. I remember seeing the sun and thinking “bright blue, aren't I supposed to think yellow when I think of the sun?”

In traumatic memory, sensory detail replaces narrative. The story shifts from what happened, to what was felt, seen, heard, tasted, and smelled. The experience becomes about experience as the content overwhelms our trauma centers, and we bend reality, we misdirect, and divert. We cope.

Experiencing that detail can trigger a PTSD event in which the event is re-experienced, even just momentarily, yet completely, but which, at that moment, causes a fully-immersive and instantaneous re-experiencing of the trauma.
Traumatic memory repeats in a loop that is always present, always happening, and always ready to become reality.

This makes me feel as though the pieces of the story that haven't been told are still there, trapped in time, hanging in air, repeating if I can tune into them. I use radio Eiko to follow the trail, to pull the threads of memory into the present, fill in the gaps, making space for the story to go differently this time.”

-Excerpts from Kate’s writing on this piece.

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