Remember Me (Pt. I)

In 2015 I came across a cross-stitched paper bookmark in a secondhand shop. It read “Remember Me - January 1 1879”. There was no other information or clue as to the giver or receiver. One hundred and thirty six years later, I was reading an impossible plea.

And so I started to look for others. Perhaps more pieces of paper and silk had somehow outlived their natural lives and the tender transactions they commemorated.

The collection began to grow. There are now over fifty - most with the original message Remember Me but some in other languages and others featuring wonderfully hyperbolic promises.

Each piece is handmade, each different, allowing us to peep behind the curtain at tiny moments of endeavour.

The collection has expanded to house one-off objects that ask the same thing. They are often tools, thimbles which suggest work undertaken with someone in mind, or a frilly pocket knife/opener which feels - in the absence of any context - like a threat.