Introduction by Dr Andrew Thompson PhD MRCP – Cognitive Neurologist, London
Angela Palmer (b1957) The Last Frontier, 2021
What do you remember?
Speaking to a lot of people about their memories, a few things quickly become clear.
Firstly, not all memories are alike.
The capital of France. How to ride a bike. The smell of my grandparents’ house. Passwords for a dozen online accounts. The reason I just walked through to the kitchen. How I felt on the day my little brother was born. I remember all of those things, but each in a different way – and each using different parts of my brain. That complexity of memory maps onto the intricate architecture of the brain, in ways that we are still working to fully understand.
Secondly, not all people are alike.
Those structures of memory work differently in each of us, and for some they are disrupted or damaged as we go through life. Sometimes this is temporary, as Ellie vividly describes that it was for her father in her liner note on Delta. Sometimes it is sadly permanent and irretrievable. Those people have taught us a lot of what we do understand about how our memories work.
Above all, it becomes clear that our memories – complex and fragmented and unreliable as they can be – are fundamental to who we each are as human beings.
It is through the lens of our memories that we see, and process, and understand everything that happens to us. They give the events of our lives context and meaning. It is not just a simple mental list of our experiences that does that. It is the emotions that are inextricably tangled through them. It is the re-living and re-telling of those experiences as we fit them into the stories of our lives. It is the memories that our families pass down to us, the memories of our cultures – even of the landscapes and buildings where we have lived. They all knit together to give us each our own narrative identity.
The works on Memory Islands offer fascinating and beautiful perspectives on that strange landscape of memory. Modern shapes are woven from the fabric of ancient sounds. Figures evolve as they are repeated, and take on new meanings, in new contexts. Words and sounds from the past resonate through to the present …
For me, this music explores how memory has made Ellie who she is – how memory makes each of us who we are.