Mary Paterson’s MEMORY EXCHANGE was part of I AM NOT A POET on 10th Aug 2011. Numerous conversations and encounters occupied the eight hours in which Mary was in residence (when Mary left the gallery the MEMORY EXCHANGE archive remained with instructions and several further contributions were added during the evening).

Here the project becomes a sequence of six photographs that each seem to hold back from the participatory and performance aspects of the event.  If the project is an event that needs to be noticed and engaged with as a social, public activity, it is also, for both artist and participant, based on private moments of reading, writing, and remembering.

That these become public and the significance of that is what MEMORY EXCHANGE articulates through its own structure, its mix of visible and invisible, chance and program, individual and group. The result is a tentative proposition about memory itself, that collapses back into the artist herself, her own memories and what she asks of them. This is one version of MEMORY EXCHANGE that I find in six photographs.

For more about Mary’s work see here. Her VSK Chapbook WORK IN PROGRESS is here.