Cornelia Abma

deep in my chest or maybe stomach

mixed media installation

“'From somewhere deep in my chest or maybe stomach, a rotary phone starts ringing.'After telling someone your life story, what’s left in the cracks of your history that can’t easily be explained in words? The things you don’t tell people, recollections you’re not sure if you dreamt, quiet moments and images that stuck with you for reasons you can’t explain? Using both personal and found imagery and objects, my thesis work meditates on the debris of memory while also facilitating a space for this debris to rest. Like sifting through a junk drawer for treasures, I’ve taken inventory of the remnants of my childhood, the poetry I’ve carried with me for years with no place to put down. Collages, image transfers, and other poetic assemblages reveal the fragmentation of memory through time, and the collection as a whole acts as a modest shrine to the past unsaid, immemorial and ephemeral, at once domestic and holy.”